Wales

Makenzie McNeill Writing Assignment #1 What makes Wales, Wales?

Spending two nights in Wales was a great experience that was full of surprises for someone who barely knew anything about the country beforehand. I was familiar with a couple of things about Wales like the fact that they have their own language, that the weather isn’t usually very nice and that there are sheep everywhere. It turns out that all of those things are true along with some other interesting dynamics.

The Welsh language is quite odd to look at. Sometimes it just looks like a random jumbling of letters with several consonants in a row. One of the things that I picked out was that “dd” makes an “f” sound which doesn’t really make sense to me. I noticed this on Cardiff University signs that had both the English spelling and the Welsh, which was “Prifysgol Caerdydd.” During my stay, I learned that only about 20% of the people in Wales speak Welsh and the rest choose to speak English. In fear of the Welsh language becoming less prominent and eventually dying out, many schools in Wales have compulsory Welsh classes. I really like this practice because the idea of the Welsh language fading away is upsetting. It seems like these classes are already getting the desired result. After looking at some numbers from BBC, the 1991 census said that only 18% of people in Wales spoke Welsh and it went up to the aforementioned 20% in 2001.

Because we stayed in the heart of downtown Cardiff during our trip to Wales, the sheep sightings were limited to the train rides to and from London. There was beautiful green scenery the entire ride with hundreds and hundreds of sheep and baby lambs. When we visited Golley Slater, the importance and prominence of sheep in

Wales was reinforced when we were shown the Welsh Lamb commercial. Sheep are a big part of their culture and economy, not to mention they’re adorable and we don’t nearly have that many (if any) wild ones in America, so it was really cool to look at. If I ever go back to Wales, I’d like to take a trip out to the countryside to get a closer look at them instead of staying in the downtown area the entire time.

With the language difference between Wales and England being their most prominent and objective difference, the two countries aren’t as similar as I expected them to be. The cultural difference between London and Cardiff is immense. There aren’t nearly as many people and the people in Wales have generally been friendlier.

London is also full of tourists, so if you need to ask someone for directions there’s a huge chance that they’re not even from the area. Most of the people we met in Wales were actually from there. Another difference is that Wales is very into rugby while England tends to pay more attention to football. On the surface this doesn’t sound like a huge disparity, but sports are a huge part of British culture that it characterizes the two countries.

My only complaint about our trip to Wales was that we didn’t spend enough time there. Cardiff was beautiful, but there’s so much more to the country that I didn’t have time to witness. On the bright side, it’s a reason to go back!