Ydych chi'n siarad Cymraeg?

 S'mae! (Hello!)

The more I am here, the more I am seeing that there is a strong Welsh history and culture. Only 19% of the citizens in Wales actually know the language, but those who do are very proud. In California, oftentimes there is an English and a Spanish version of various pamphlets and booklets. Here, there are both English and Welsh. On my third day here there was a banquet for international students. In order to welcome us all to Wales, they had dancers perform traditional Welsh folk-dances with live music in the background.

It was a lot of fun to watch. The pride they had in their country was practically beaming off of them. They were more than happy to then invite all of the international students to come up and joint them. So I wasn't alone in embarrassing myself, the two girls I went to the event with also did some folk dancing.

No one was able to perform the dance very well. Even the professionals were having a hard time since all the other dancers struggled. It is meant to be done in a circle with partners, so even if one or two people are good, the rest can bring them down. But it was all in good fun with everyone laughing at themselves.

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Another cultural event happened tonight with the Swansea University Christian Union. They are the equivalent of America's Intervarsity. They decorated the whole room in Welsh flags and symbols (inflatable dragon, inflatable daffodil, guy wearing a daffodil hat, etc.).

Welsh flags everywhere.

I really liked this inflatable dragon.

 They served leek and potato soup (leek is the national vegetable) along with a cheese called Caerphilly. It is creamy and slightly crumbly; they put it in their soup.There was also some bread and butter, which is pretty universal. The traditional desserts offered were fruit cake and Welsh cake. The fruit cake was like a very sweet raisin bread. It was even served sliced with butter. We were told that in the old Welsh culture, a girl reached womanhood once she was finally able to produce a good fruit cake on her own. Admittedly, I didn't care too much for it. What I really liked was the Welsh cake. It is the size of a thick round cracker and was described as a mix between a scone and a pound cake. I found this to be pretty accurate. It also had raisins in it, which meshed really well. Apparently they are sold all over Wales, but not other parts of the UK.

I didn't take a picture, but I did the google images search for you all.

  The ones they gave us were homemade. I decided that after spending a year in Wales, I would come back to America fully able to produce an authentic Welsh cake from scratch. Now I just need a scale, since apparently that's how they measure everything. When I asked about that, the question, "How do they do it in America?" came up. I said that we use cups. They then asked if everyone used the same sized cups in America or if they didn't how that worked. Measuring cups can be a foreign concept. Just as the idea of weighing out flour for cakes are to us.

This event was a lot more informative about the culture than the first one. We were given quizzes to answer that were "easy". The only people who found them to be easy were the Welsh and there were not too many natives there. Myself and a girl from Essex had a very difficult time. I do not know what the popular word "llan" means, nor who the patron saint of Wales is. Of course now I know that the answers are church and David, but I wouldn't have guessed it previously. The only answer I did know was that Cardiff is the capital of Wales.

We were also given the task of matching up the literal Welsh names with the proper animal. Myself and the girl from Essex were only able to reason that the ladybird went to "short red cow" and the "smelly dog" was the skunk. The two gents at our table were from Wales and refused to help up with either the quiz or the match-up. In the end, we got most right on both (though one of the guys did help us with the quiz at first before stopping).

The night ended with another Welsh folk-dancing lesson. This group was even worse than the international. During the learning-the-dance portion, we even had an odd number of people, making a paired dance impossible. But, as before, we could all laugh at ourselves and have a great time.

It's events like these that make me feel accomplished at learning a new culture. Yes, things are different here. But the traditional Welsh stuff is even described by the locals as, "weird". I love it!