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This is our last day in Wales. We will be going back home tomorrow in the early afternoon (we could even be leaving in the morning!) The reason for our early departure is that we have a new family member coming back home with us. His name is Tom and he is the cutest and friendliest cat ever.
He is a stray cat, or at least that’s what it seems. We have the theory that he must have been born in a farm and the farmer couldn’t care for him so he let him go. He has been taken to the vet, who has confirmed that he is a healthy adult, has been castrated and doesn’t have a microchip. An ideal situation for us to take him home and not feel guilty about it.
He has been living in the B&B where we are staying for the last few months. The owners of the B&B have been feeding him, however they are not very happy about it all since having pets in a B&B is not something you should have for several reasons (like health and safety, allergies, etc). They are going to miss Tom when he is gone, but they are also happy to see him go because they know that he is going to a good home.
We went to Pets at Home yesterday and spent a little fortune on items for Tom. Jon and I have never had a pet (and none of us has ever had a cat full stop) so we are going to have to go through a learning process on how to care for a cat and to live in harmony with one. There are so many things about cats that we didn’t know! I had no idea, for example, that cats sleep for around 16 hours a day…
He has been called Tom by the B&B owners (probably from “Tomcat”) and we thought of chnging his name to something else. We tried to come up with other names but failed miserably. After a funny episode where Tom tricked me into believing that he hadn’t been fed yet, we decided to rename him “Thomas Derren”, as in Derren Brown, the famous illusionist 
On other issues about our holiday, I suppose it is worth mentioning how naive Jon and I were when we were packing our suitcase. Despite having been in the same location for our holiday last year, we still packed shorts, flipflops, short sleeved t-shirts, and no jumpers, jackets or raincoats or nothing. Wishful thinking, it’s called… 
We had a couple of good days at the beginning of the holiday and we enjoyed gorgeous walks in Pendine and St Gowans coast path, etc. I managed to take quite a few stunning pictures (will try to upload some at some point, here or in Flickr) and see quite a few rare birds (apparently, one of them was a “linnet“, that I had never heard of before). It has poured down for the remaining of the holiday and we have just relaxed. We also went to the National Botanical Gardens of Wales (a must in any visit to Wales), however it did rain quite heavily as well and we couldn’t enjoy the full extent of the place.
We also visited Carmarthen and did some shopping there. We had a funny “adventure” when we went for lunch. We firstly went into this pub. My first impression of the place was not very good, it was smelly, the landlady looked drunk, then I saw the chef and he looked the greasiest person alive. We decided to finish our drinks and try somewhere else for lunch. We then went to a place called Diablo’s where we had the best chips I’ve eaten in my life. They were called “triple cooked” chips and they were awesome. Quite similar to roast potatoes, but like chips! I wonder if they use the same recipe as Heston Blumenthal, but they were really good…
All in all it has been a great holiday, I love it here, everybody is so nice and friendly. I love the hills, I love the sea, I love the sheep, I love the scenery, the people, but not the weather. I think that if I was ever going to move to Wales I would need to completely re-think my wardrobe and buy all types of waterproof clothing 
As a Spanish person living in the UK, learning new vocabulary is something that I do actively, passively and unconsciously. There is no way that someone can come to live to a different country knowing all the words in the dictionary, or even all the meanings of all the words in the dictionary. There are words that enter your world one day and they don’t ever leave you. Ever. Because of the context, you instinctively know the meaning, when to use it and all that. You absorb them and then, one day, you start using them as if you had always known them.
I don’t intend to talk about how to build your English vocabulary as a foreign learner. No. Please go away if that is what you’re looking for and Mr. Google played a dirty trick on you. This is meant to be a recollection of anecdotes, of those moments when I consciously remember learning a new word.
Today’s new word is: Rubbernecking.
Background: I was never ever interested in cars or driving before I came to live in the UK. Like I’ve already told many times before, I never needed to drive back in Spain. I didn’t want to. My hatred for cars and driving stayed intact for many many years.
Then I moved to the UK where you MUST have a car if you really want to have a life (unless you live in London, where it works the other way round: having a car there is suicidal). Due to the horizontal construction nature of the UK, everything is miles away from anything else. If you happen to live in a new building state like mine, then you have to drive even to get a pint of milk from the nearest shop. So I had to learn to drive and get a car.
I passed my practical driving test on the third go. The first two fails were quite unlucky, really. But I don’t want to put salt in the still-open wound and will leave that subject alone. The thing is that little by little I became more and more confident at driving.
All of this also brought new vocabulary to my life. Now I HAD TO KNOW about Slip lanes, pelican crossings, hard shoulders, etc, and parts of the car that I didn’t (and don’t) even know in Spanish, like exhaust, spoiler, alloys, etc.
But it was the words more related to the act of driving (and driving carelessly) that I learnt faster. Two words come to mind:
Tailgating and Rubbernecking. I will focus on Rubbernecking today.
The Oxford Online Dictionary only has one entry for the word. The Merriam-Webster has got two.
If you look it up on Wordreference.com, the meaning they give you does not completely convey the full meaning of the word: “fisgonear, estirar el cuello para curiosear” – they forget to mention the traffic jams it causes!
So, yes, as you can imagine I was stuck in traffic today. The worst traffic jam I have ever had to endure. Two hours and something, stop-starting, with pains on my clutch foot, without any air conditioning in the hottest day of the year so far. And what was the cause of such insufferable holdup? An accident.
I do understand that accidents cause delays. First you have to recover from the shock of having had “a bump” with another car, probably when you both were doing 80mph and the chaos that this must cause has to be B-I-G. Then, wait for the police, wait for the ambulance, the highway maintenance, the firemen, the helicopters… Eventually the road clears, but this doesn’t mean that the cars can go and build up their speed back to the normal 60-70mph. No. All the cars that have accumulated for the last hour in the traffic jam now decide that they also have the right to drive slowly past the accident site to have a good look at those other people misfortune. This, ladies and gentleman, is the most accurate definition of rubbernecking that you’ll ever get.
However, the whole episode gets even more annoying when come your turn to rubberneck, there isn’t an accident scene no more! It was cleared half an hour ago! No bumped cars. No police. No ambulance. Not even debris on the road. If I have had to endure two hours of traffic jam due to an accident, I WANT to see that accident!
(P.S. I didn’t learn this word today. I’ve known it for a while. Today, however, was the last drop!)
On Tom, wishful thinking and other holiday adventures »« Sore losers
Maybe I went a bit over the top this morning, waving the spanish flag all over the office and humming the spanish national anthem. Yes, I believe it was a bit OTT. I was kind of expecting sympathy from everybody, even from the only German in our office (after hearing him say that he’s not into football and that he couldn’t care less if Germany lost). However, I was a tiny bit hurt to see a couple or two of SORE LOSERS trying to spoil the moment for me.
I can’t stand sore losers, although I shouldn’t be too critical of them, since I am one too! Being so competitive and so in love with winning, I can’t but help being one. I don’t hold grudges, though. As I said the other day, football is just a game and you can’t let it ruin your life!
This guy in particular has really surprised me. First of all because he is Polish and has taken the German defeat quite personally. This coming from a Polish is quite amusing from my own point of view… Weren’t the Polish badly ass-kicked by the Germans in World War II? To this point, also mention that I kind of understand his attraction to the German team because there are like 3 or 4 players from Polish origin playing for the team. When I said to him that in the Spanish team EVERYBODY was Spanish born, he didn’t believe me. And secondly because during the normal football season, he always boasts of following La Liga and supporting Barcelona, when nobody else knows nothing much about any football that is not the English Premier League.
I don’t care about football. Very rarely you’ll find me watching a football match that doesn’t have any international significance (I would watch a Champions League final with a Spanish team on it, and things like that). However I will always always support the team of the country that I left behind. For one main reason: Because it’s one of the “little” things that keep my Spanishness alive and because I don’t feel ashamed to admit that, once every couple of years, I really enjoy shouting “VAMOS ESPAÑA!!” loudly at the telly.
F*ck you, sore loser. And next time, make sure YOUR COUNTRY’S team get into the World Cup finals!
