ME Sci Pints and Monet

I apologize to all of you out there who are interested in sophisticated things like history, art, culture, architecture because I will admit that the next few entries probably won't be anything to do with any of those things...

For the past week (week 2) I've just being doing the whole Cardiff thing and the more I find out about the UK and Cardiff especially the more wonderful it seems and the more I would love to live somewhere in the UK for some period of time (sorry mom).

OOH I LIED! I will talk about art...The Welsh National Museum is absolutely amazing!
If you ever have a chance to go to the UK and get to Wales the museum is a MUST.
First of all it is 100% FREE to the public, I literally just walked in and started browsing around because I had some time off between lectures and the museum is incredible. I started off in the Evolution of Wales Exhibit which has a giant woolly mammoth skeleton, beautiful ammonites, and some sick marine and land dinosaur skeletons. I was truly impressed by the scale of the exhibits...and then I went upstairs to the art galleries.
French impressionism was my goal and I just stood there staring at Monet's, Manet's, Cezzane's, Degas'...you name them...my favourite?
Look left...Claude Monet's San Giorgio Maggiore at Dusk. Lovely.


The museum is not my default place to go when I have time to kill, awesome. Not that I have a whole lot of that now, classes have started and it's nose to the grindstone, well sort of.
Mostly classes are great, weird in that they only meet about once or twice a week but really interesting. I love my geology class and geo lecturer, he's awesome. It was my first class without any Colgaters in it and I was freaking out, but then I walked into the room and lecture started and it was about geology and I experienced an absolutely wonderful feeling of contentment, relaxing, and excitement all at once...I was in the right place. I don't want to get too sentimental but after taking paleo last semester I was seriously concerned that I had picked the wrong major, so it was a huge relief to know that I really do love geology.

I also looooove, love, love geology majors...and they're pretty much the same everywhere. One lovely lady named Milly (a senior master's student from England who did a semester in Miami) sort of took my under her wing and introduced me to another Earth Science student, Juliet, who is studying here for a semester from Miami. They were both wonderful and invited me to an awesome event they call 'pints.'
If I could have one seriously convincing arguement for the benefits of lowering the drinking age in the US it would be to have experiences like pints. Basically the ME Sci students (Masters of Earth Sciences) and a couple of lecturers go to a local pub every Thursday for a few pints and just to relax and get to know one another and enjoy geology love. It was such a chill experience, probably one of my favs so far here in Cardiff.

NB. Coasters are called 'beer mats' and the reigning table game during pints is to try and flip a stack of 'beer mats' from the edge of the table (hanging halfway off) up onto the top of your pint just by flicking it up with your fingers...I'm a champ nbd.