WALES (UK)

Have you lived in or visited Wales? Tell us about it!

Aberystwyth, Ceredigion, Wales, United Kingdom, Europe — April 2018 — First, the facts. It’s a small student dominated town on the Welsh Coast, famous for nothing in particular and home of no one of note. Whether that is good or not is up to you. Aberystwyth is two different places to live. On a good day, usually in summer, it is fantastic and you’ll want to spend your whole life here. You’ll go to the beach, then an evening stroll along the promenade, watch the sunset on the ruins of the castle, finally you will return to the beach for a bonfire/bbq and watch the sunrise. It feels although time doesn’t effect Aberystwyth. Sure the shops change now and then, and various nightclubs come and go, but everything basically remains the same. You’ll hope things never change, and they probably won’t.

On other days you’ll be desperate to leave. It’ll be raining and you’ll be facing a depressing trudge to the shops. The cinema is about the size of someone’s living room and is always packed. Roaming bands of drunk students take over the town at night and the wait for the doctors is always long. There seams to be nothing to do, if you don’t have a car you are at the mercy of the trains or worse, the buses. There are no career prospects, unless you are willing to spend the next few decades at the exact same place doing the exact same work. On the bad days your memories of the good ones will be enough to keep you in Aberystwyth.

Cardiff, Wales, United Kingdom, (Europe) — April 2018 — Cardiff, United Kingdom. It’s a good city and I like living here. I’ve mostly only lived near the city centre, and while the cost of rent is higher here, it’s a lot more convenient to get around if you don’t drive. As the capital of Wales, it’s quite a big city, though not crazy big like New York or London. You can still randomly bump into people you haven’t seen in a while, and it’s not all that surprising. Most of the going out happens in the city centre anyway, so it’s easy to feel like it’s quite a small place despite the 300-400k population. It’s also surprisingly spread out – and the more distant from the centre a particular neighbourhood is, the more remote it seems from the busy city centre.

A friend of mine said the other day that he grew up in Pentwyn – which is an area of Cardiff. It’s a very distinct place for him – and I can completely understand why. You can see the houses on their little dead-end roads, with tidy driveways and sturdy build, and you can’t really imagine that they’re in the same city as Cardiff Castle. It’s quite endearing really – completely different worlds in the same city. The only thing that bothers me is bin collection day, and how sometimes it just doesn’t happen. Have a bank holiday? Your neighbourhood may simply be skipped over for bin day, and all your and your neighbour’s rubbish is simply left on the pavement. It makes everything very messy!