This past week was "Reading Week" here at CU, which means that lots of the UK students go home for the week and get their laundry done and eat some homemade food. It also means that I (who have greedily been home cooking my own food all along and doing laundry in the comfort of my kitchen) have been reading and reading and reading, and then worrying that I'm not reading enough, and then trying to shape the crammed reading ideas into some thoughts about what an essay might look like, and then reading some more. Read, worry, repeat, as much as my poor brain can handle. But I did require some break time. So my dear Jason, who had been scouting ahead of time, took me to Cowbridge for a day hike through the hills and dales and farm country.
The sun was out, the air was fresh and all in all it was a great day for a mind clearing walk. Seven and a half miles of pastures and villages and seriously old churches, along with some smelly sileage, a couple of rabbit corpses, and a closed pub with a toilet you can't use. We saw kids who hide behind a stone well and jump out to make faces at passing cars, and a woodland teeming with paint-ball dudes who J. says had terrible battle skills. We saw elegant, languorous windmills, which are a "blight on the landscape" if you ask the locals, and lots of huge electrical towers and wires, which are apparently invisible to those same British countryside lovers.
It was a great afternoon, begun with a visit to the farmers' market for some farmhouse cheese and a loaf of bread with rye stalks that looked like hay embedded in the bottom of it, and ended at a pub with some fish and chips and mushy peas for me, and some delicious salmon and pesto on rocket for J.
P.S. Mushy peas are not as bad as you'd think--and peas were my hated vegetable as a kid!
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