Strange, Sometimes.

I always knew it supposedly happened – I'd read about it in Cosmo's Top Flirting Tips, for one thing – but I don't think I really believed that people did it. Not real people. Movie people, maybe; trashy romance novel characters, definitely. But to a slightly hippy, slightly out-of-place Australian girl in jeans and boots in a bar full of mini skirts and sequins? You don't expect her notice a boy on the other side of the bar room, and, finding him attractive, catch his eye and smile. And, having done that, you don't then expect him to smile back, and make his way across the people-filled room to introduce himself. I mean, the eye-contact-and-smile technique doesn't really work, does it? It’s a glamour magazine ploy.

Well, the alcohol probably helped. Emma, my new flatmate had just moved in, and we'd spent all afternoon – she, her friends and I – trying to understand the instruction leaflet to her new Ikea furniture and failing miserably. So, what can you do in a situation like that but buy a couple of bottles of wine and bang a little harder with the hammer. By the time we’d made what came out of the box look somewhat like the display model at the store, we'd finished the wine, and a couple of the beers and someone suggested absinthe shots at the apartment across the road. I think that was the turning point.

So when the guy with scruffy hair and natty shirt came over, I was full of Dutch courage and confidence and bravado and introduced myself. And he said, in a thick Welsh accent, that his name was ‘Giz’. I may have snorted into my drink, and asked him ‘exactly what sort of a name was “Giz?”’

‘A nickname, obviously.’ He replied.

Obviously.

‘Short for what?’ I asked, and he said something incomprehensible in Welsh, starting with a ‘G’.

‘ “Giz” it is then,’ I replied.

We danced, and attempted to yell a conversation over the music. Eventually, we gave it up, and just kissed. I lost the girls I had come in with, and he lost the lads he'd come in with and so we went to another club (and he paid for me to go in, and bought me a drink, and, like a true gentleman, he wouldn't listen to my feminist-styled complaints that I could pay for myself.)Here, he danced with me, and I was happily surprised to find that he could dance, not just sway on the dance-floor, vaguely in time with the music. We kissed, and when the lights came on, without really meaning to, I took him home.

It's strange how some things work out. I knew nothing about him when I caught his eye across the barroom, nothing except that he was a cute, slim boy who smiled at me when I smiled at him. He could have been a bogan, he could have been boring. By law of averages, he should have been English. He could have been a sleaze and he could have been only interested in a one night stand. Instead, the guy I woke up next to on Friday morning was entertaining and warm and open. He's travelled and seen amazing parts of the world. He tells interesting anecdotes in a thick Welsh accent, knows the local area and talks casually of showing it to me. And he wants to take me out again, so that the eye-contact across the bar becomes a meeting, not just a hook-up. And he takes me out dancing again, and doesn't mind when I drink a little too quickly causing me to freak out in an overcrowded club that smells of sweat and pot smoke and he doesn't complain when I ask to be taken home. He promises to call when he gets back from Japan next week, and then calls from the airport before he leaves.

It’s funny how sometimes you things just happen. I'm not used to it, but I guess you have to fluke it sometimes.

Here, here. Here.

I started this journal so that I wouldn’t have to email everyone all the time. Instead, I find that I neglect my journal by spending all my time online emailing people. Sorry, poor journal and dear readers. So, this is an update. Nothing poetic, just the facts.

I’ve been in the United Kingdom for a month now. Been to London (you heard about that), and an archaeological dig in Arram (and you heard about that) and York (gorgeous buildings, so much history, good ghost stories). And I went and visited the rellies in Somerset. I’d forgotten how many there were! And they all wanted to meet their Australian cousin. I was taken out to dinner, and taken to the castles and taken on a walk up the Glastonbury Tor.

And now I am in Swansea. I’ve been settled here for three weeks now, although I have done a few jaunts around the countryside in that time. It all just kinda fell into place really. I’d been off the train for two hours and decided to take a walk to uni. At uni, I saw a poster advertising for a flatmate wanted and I gave the girl a call. An hour later, and I was sitting having a beer in the local pub and I had a house and a contact. Liz has been great, showing me around the place and helping me settle in. But she doesn’t live with me, she had to move back to Cardiff to study at the uni there. Instead I live with two English girls, Emma and Hannah, who are lovely and we’re all getting along alright so far. And the third housemate is a Welsh girl named Hayley. I don’t see much of her – she’s not a student , she works full time, and when she’s at home she’s hiding in her room. But I get along well with her when we sit and chat while she watches her soaps on TV.

There are very few Welsh people around though. It seems like nearly everyone I meet is English – especially at the uni. Which is kinda strange and a bit of a bummer. I did really want think there would be more Welsh people around. You know, seeing as it is Wales and all.

Its fresher’s week this week at uni. During the day there are uni things to do, like enrol and go on campus tours and sign up for clubs (Tomorrow, I join the Theatre Society, I am hanging out to be in a production again). At night, everyone in town goes crazy, meeting up with all those friend they haven’t seen in months and all the big nightclubs throw huge parties. There are so many people out and about – it all gets a little overwhelming. I hope to find somewhere a little more chilled out once all this settles down. Classes start next week, and frankly, I’m pretty keen to go. I’ve picked my subjects and they all sound really exciting. I won’t deny it, I am a history geek.

And I’m enjoying it here, especially now that I know some people (and I’ve even had a date!)Brett’s now in London, and I’ll be visiting him soon. It’ll be good to see a familiar face, although I think I’ve forgotten what the accent sounds like.

And so that, as they say, is the facts. Feel updated now?

Swansea

There is beauty here, too. You just have to look a little harder to find it. The outline of a three pointed autumn leaf stencilled in brown on the side of a townhouse wall. The clang of an old-style bell at the front door of a renovations shop. The broken stairs covered in a green, bushy creeper. The smell of saltwater and so many shells that they crunch underfoot. The surprise at finding castle ruins in the midst of all the modern shops. A Narnia-like little path over a creek, through the trees in the park, which blocks of the sound of the traffic and changes the world around you.

I said this was an ugly little city. I may have lied.

Near Beverly, Yorkshire

Things I learnt while working on an archaeological dig in Arram:

– That despite the entire UK being small enough to fit twice into NSW with room left over, something as simple as travelling from London to Beverley, which should really only take about three and a half hours, takes over five hours, and involves two buses and three trains.

– That all Brits, whether they follow cricket or not, upon hearing my accent, like to rub it in that they are beating us at Cricket. I’d just like to say, it took you eighteen damn years! I wouldn’t gloat just yet.

– That staying in a Fourteenth-Century-Dominican-Friary-cum-Youth-Hostel practically all by yourself sounds awesome, but is damn creepy come midnight.

– That archaeologists are really passionate about archaeology. After six days with these guys, I think we had a total of five conversations that didn’t revolve around a dig. Four of those five conversations were about where we were going to go for beer tonight.

– That archaeologists find putting the Australian in the tent marked ‘beer tent’ pretty damn amusing.

– That dirt ain’t dirt, apparently. There are many, many types of dirt, and just as many words to describe them.

– That after digging at the same bare hole for two days, finding a bit of broken Roman Pottery at the bottom is very exciting.

– That it’s pretty exciting to look out over a trench and suddenly see the blobs of different coloured dirt resolve into a picture. You finally know what everyone else was talking about, and can see where the Iron Age hut and its surrounding pit used to be. It’s like watching one of those 3D pictures coming into focus.

– Holding something in your hand that was made over 2000 years ago is awe inspiring.

– That there is a huuuge difference between the East Yorkshire accent and the West Yorkshire accent. Apparently.

– That to a German, the Australian accent sounds a lot like the East Yorkshire accent.

– That archaeology is fifty per cent geology, fifty per cent history, and I’m not such a big fan of geology.

– That I don’t think I am archaeologist material, I think I’ll stick to the book side of history.

– That the East Yorkshire archaeologists find it very amusing to regale the Australian with stories of ghostly monks before she has to go back to the Friary at night....

– That I want to come back to Yorkshire.