In Flanders fields

So I went to England yesterday.

It was just for the day, and I went to see the small town of Hay-on-Wye, known for having the greatest number of books per square mile of any place in the world. My advisor at WU had recommended it to me when I told him I would be coming to Wales this fall, and it was definitely worth the trip.

I took the morning train from Aberystwyth to Shrewsbury, and then another train from Shrewsbury south to Hereford. While having lunch, I couldn’t help but overhear a conversation between two older men at the table next to mine, one of whom was saying that “they need to just get all the young people together and figure out the problems in this country.” I also noticed, even in my short time there, a significant difference in how people acted around each other. There was less of the genuine kindness that I’ve gotten used to in my time in Wales; people seemed to walk around with neutral, inquisitive expressions, as if to ask who you were and what you were doing there. I tried some of their famous brown sauce on my chips – not what I had hoped it would be.

From there, I caught a bus out to Hay-on-Wye, a remote village on the border of Wales and England, situated just above the River Wye, considered by many Britain’s most scenic river. On the way there, I wound up talking to two students from Biola (small conservative college in LA), and I mentioned to them that not only had my stepmom gone there, but my cousin (and his fiancée) were students there at the moment, as well. They were studying abroad too, one at Oxford and the other at Roehampton, in London.

I spent a few hours in the town, walking around to many of the bookstores and shops, one of which was inside an old castle, and had many books lined on metal shelves outside, some under tin roofs and others completely exposed to the weather. There was an “honesty policy” in place, where you were asked to pay for the books you wanted by placing money inside a metal receptacle. It was kind of an odd setup, but somehow it just made sense. Another bookstore was housed in what used to be a cinema. I found a first-edition copy of Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and the Damned for only ten quid, and bought a couple postcards as well, mailing one of them to Prof. Ellis (sort of a “hey, I took your advice” kind of gesture).

On the way back, I met a lady from Tasmania (yes, that Tasmania) who lives in London. It was interesting meeting her – another one of those chance encounters between two people from entirely different corners of the globe, whose paths in any other era would probably have never crossed. I took the train from Hereford station back to Shrewsbury, and then back to Aber, sharing the car on the last leg of the journey with a large group of Welsh teenagers, obviously well into their Saturday-night celebration.

Today is Remembrance Day in Great Britain, the 89th anniversary of the ending of World War I, and the armistice that fell on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of that year. There was a short ceremony at the war memorial this morning, with a two-minute period of silence at eleven o’clock marked by the firing of two small fireworks shells into the November air. Two groups of people in uniforms – one made up of scouts, I assumed, and another of soldiers – stood around the base of the memorial, wearing red poppy emblems. A crowd of people gathered together for several minutes, and then dissolved, everyone falling back into their usual weekend routines.

The sun is setting once again over the bay, and seagulls are flying around my window. About ten minutes ago, three people strolled down the promenade below, one playing a Mexican tune on an accordion and another keeping the beat on a small drum. It’s weird to think that I've long since passed the halfway mark in my time here in Wales, and that I only have a little over a month left before I take the train back to London and fly out of Gatwick on the 16th. I can’t decide if the last month and a half-plus has gone by quickly, or if it seems like just yesterday I was stepping off the train on that Saturday afternoon in late September. Either way, I know that I still have a good amount of time left in this place, and as much as it sounds like a cliché, I really am going to make the most of it.