Hi my friends, welcome to UK!
Life is kind of different here,
with the cold snowy weather and lovely tea-hunting people and the ridiculously difficult accents and everything,
but thank God that I still get some time to do some traveling!
(notice here that it's "some time", not "all the time". I do study some other time, alright!)
So, join me today to Snowdonia National Park.
Wales（威爾斯）is located southwest to Liverpool (the city I live now) with about 90 miles distance.
This sunny afternoon,
after about 2 hours' drive with nice blue sky and some countryside scenery,
we arrived at Llanuwchllyn.
Don't bother asking me how to pronounce "Llanuwchllyn",
until now I still don't have a clue XD
Apparently, people living in Wales have their own language,
which is called welsh and is nothing like English at all!
Too bad we did not have any classmate from Wales on the trip,
so I guess we never got it right....
on the other hand, we did have a lot of fun trying pronouncing the words XDD
Now, let me show you some pictures of the house we stayed in Llanuwchllyn.
We start with this living room full of "wow-factors."
Comfortable sofa! Wow~
A real fireplace (not the decorating one)! Wow~
A Piano! Wow~
And you know what! This house is LISTED! （類似像是台灣的古跡！不能拆遷！）
Wowow~
With the fire started, the room became the warmest room of the house,
that was why I decided to sleep here the first night!
(definitely not because of we have 12 people and there's only 10 beds XD...)
Then, this was the living room on the 2nd floor. Awesome!
Too bad the fireplace was only for decoration, so nobody wanted to stay here XD
It was my bedroom for the 2nd night (main living room party was still on that night....)
This was the dining table all well set!
My classmates cooked the dinner and set the table!!
How do you describe something better than awesome!
Finally, it's dinner time! Yeah~
See how happy these people were, with food in front of them XDD!
That night I volunteered to bring out the garbage,
and this is my reward!!
Beautiful night sky!
Too bad I did not bring tripod (simply can't carry anymore in my bag when coming to UK).
Managed to get this orion leaning on a tree XD...
The house was nice, but it was not the best part of the trip!
The second day we went for a short walk in the small hill near the house.
The small town we stayed is near Bala lake.
And there is a Bala Lake Railroad running side by side with the lake
The train station at Llanuwchllyn looked deserted in the early morning.
Maybe because the train does not operate in winter time.
As you can see, the sky's grey and a little bit misty....
Right there, I met 2 dogs happily jumping at me and then came a lovely old lady.
"Isn't it nice the weather?"
I think I looked bewildered at her.
She then added "well, I mean, by the standard of Wales."
XD, there you go!
It turns out Wales is rainy, and sometimes snowy, too.
So as long as it's not rainy or snowy, I think it's good enough!
We went for a walk after a late breakfast.
On the way we had to cross the "horse road."
I haven't work out why there would be those horse roads, maybe someone can give me a hint?
Oh, and Erna told me because we were walking the horse road,
we should walk like a horse.........-.-|||
I really want to put this video about some of us dancing "kannan style" in the middle of the hill,
but I guess I'll have to ask for some permission first XD
We wondered around, passing the flocks of sheep and some small hills.
Some of us started to ask where we were going.
After asking the sheep, we were officially lost.....
(well, there's no one else to talk to...)
All we got was an over-simplified map and really had a difficulty finding "some trees" draw on the map XD
So, we just wondered around a bit more and decided this is it! Let's go back XD
Of course a group photo on the hilltop is necessary!
The Bala lake looked like a small pond from up there.
We were on our way back to the village in the middle of this photo.
After a nice meal with fish and chips, we did go to the lake later that afternoon.
Later that night we were joined by three adventurers from Australia finishing Mt. Snowdon in 4.5 hours on that day!!
And we were told it's great!
So the rest of us were keen to go for that walk the next day and went to bed early after live pianist and magician performance. Again, my classmates are really talented XD!
The weather next day was just incredibly good!!!!
On the way to Snowdon (the one in the middle of the picture),
we just can't help stopping for a photo.
By the way, Mt. Snowdon is the highest mountain in Wales with an altitude of 1085 m.
(2nd highest in UK)
Yeahyeahyeah, I know, you would say that's not high AT ALL.
I agree, but look, it's summit is covered in white!!!!!
You don't need to climb 4000 m just to see the snowy cap, instead, you can stand on it at just 1000 m!
How great is that!?
So, let's get started!
The track we took is called LLWYBR track. Have you also noticed that there is no vowel XD?
As always, in the beginning,
it's always all the way up!
But it was easy and I could even run!
(not that I want to but I kind of HAVE to, 'cause it's really cold....)
Some good stuffs started to appear on our way up!
The shape of the lake is pretty interesting, do you notice that?
As the road got more and more covered with ice,
I started to realize that walking on the ice was definitely not something I was comfortable with.
It was like going to fall on every stop!
As my legs tried harder to keep me from falling, the slower my pace was.
Then we Asian people started to crawl....
(Damn! The girl from Norway still had her hands in the pocket!!!!!)
If you look closely, you can tell a line of people in the white snowy background on the top of this photo.
That was the place I planned to go.
And this is the last one picture I took on my way up,
afterward it got harder and harder and I had to try very hard to keep my but off the ground XD.
Eventually, we all successfully reached o the ridge.
Hmmm, there is rail coming from down there!
You know, if you come in summer,
you barely need to walk 'cause there will be a train bring you all the way up here!
Haha, I guess we can come back again in summer XDDD (kidding! that would be of no fun XD)
Last few steps to the summit!!!
Let's go!!!
HELP!HELP!!! WE ARE HERE!!! XDD
Yeah! Finally!
This is the summit. So, everyone was taking picture around here.
No wonder people say that Snowdon is the "busiest mountain in Britain" XD...
The cloud caught us at the summit,
and it was getting late, so we headed back.
To be honest I didn't know how I was going to GO DOWN....
And then I saw this weird four-legged creature crawling on the way....
It was people using both hands and feet slowly moving on the ice.
I have to say it looked REALLY STUPID,
but I just can't think of a better way......so.......
Thank God no one took a picture of me when I was doing this spider-like movement XDDD
And after a while I kind of got used to the snow and tried to stand up walking.
After falling and landing on my but for several times,
I found it's actually of a lot of fun doing that and so I spent the rest of the time sliding all the way down.
Whoo~
That's really much faster XD
Again it was a late lunch.
We tried to chase the sunlight and wanted to have lunch under the sunshine....
However, the shade kept on catching us immediately after we sat down!
Whatever!
It was still a nice place to picnic!
And finally we were back to the ordinary kind of path XDD
Walking by the lake had magic healing effect,
because I totally forgot the traumatic experience of crawling around XDDD
No, I mean, the view was just so great!
What a great weekend, isn't it!?
Anyway,
just sharing with you some of the fun parts I had here at UK.
We'll talk more about what I see here, hopefully XD!
