Food and drink in Cardiff

 

Our first contact with Welsh food came in the welcome session, after a comforting coffee in a freezing , rainy, windy morning. Mr David Evans gave all the course assistants, along with the coffee, tones of interesting information about Wales History and Culture, and the last papers we were given dealt with traditional Welsh recipes. We could try some of them in the following days.

Most of them were cakes and pastry. I could taste Bara brith, a sweet bread cooked with black tea and fruit, very tasty and with a surprising spicy flavour. That spicy touch was really both  shocking and pleasing. 

Other recipes, like Teisen lap and Welsh rarebit, were fat-rich  traditional recipes. Rarebit is specially simple, basically melted Cheddar cheese on thick wholemeal bread, with a pinch of cayenne pepper: great! Sometimes, the recipe name can be misleading, as in Glamorgan sausage. Not a little bit of sausage or meat in it! Mainly just breadcrumbs, cheese, eggs and some veggies, such as leek, spring onions, parsley and thyme.

However, my favourite was Welsh cawl, a lamb meat and vegetables stew. Somewhat similar to Spanish caldereta de cordero, with a bigger variety of vegetables. I couldn’t help cooking it, back in Spain. There wasn't barley available, so I used brown rice instead, with a more than acceptable result. Like caldereta, Welsh cawl enhances its flavour if eaten the following day.

As for food and drink during our stay in Cardiff, we used to have a continental breakfast in the hotel dining room, (Oyo Sandringham Hotel, small but clean and cozy). In the afternoon, during the lessons break, just some sandwiches were usually our brunch.  Sometimes we got to a nearby arcade, and we had coffee and cakes at Barker’s Coffee, a beautiful place, very tastefully decorated. After our visit to Welsh Assembly, in Cardiff Bay, by Cardiff harbour, cod  fish and chips, although not tipically Welsh, was a must.

Cardiff is a small capital city, compared to other huge, massive capital cities in Europe. That makes it a lovable / livable city, where you can walk and find warm, welcoming and inviting places to have a chat and a drink. In the evenings, we usually had dinner in one of the nearby  restaurants to refill our energy levels and talk about the day and the course.  There is a lot of international food offer in Cardiff, so we could have Mexican, Italian or Indian dishes for dinner.

 But a really comforting and enjoyable seasoning for fajitas, or pizza, or whatever you may be eating is music. In many of these places, excellent singers and musicians performed a rich repertoire, mainly covers of all-time hits. No surprise British music rules throughout the world. It seems to be part of their lives and their culture;  both playing and listening in such a natural, easy-going way…really pleasing.

HOW WONDERFUL IT WAS TO MEET GREAT TEACHERS IN CARDIFF

 

After several months,  I can still  feel the fantastic memories from our travel and participation in Cardiff course.  Meeting new colleagues from other countries and cultures is one of the best point to enrich ourselves when we attend to this kind of experience. We don’t only learnt a lot of new digital techniques to use with our students, but also we had the chance of sharing the same difficulties in teaching , the same hopes to improve our methodology and mainly, the aim of being  better  teachers while refreshing our English and make new friends.

We met a group a  wonderful teachers who we could enjoy with a lot from the first moment . Our cheerful and talkative Eleonora & Ambrafrom Italy,  Petra from Czech Republic, Sabina and Katrin from Germany, Geri, Dimitria and Paulina from Bulgaria, and Claire from France. Imposible not to mention our adorable teacher, Joe Dale, important glue in this group and perfect coach all the time. 

How easy it was to learn together with partners who have the same aims with different nationalities and realities but  with similar goals.  Nowadays, we need to be into the digital world for our students and  we could check how funny is to learn these techniques together and playing with our classmates like our students do everyday.

We felt very comfortable performing and working hard together with them and despite being the largest group from Spain, We tried to mix all the time in our homework during the lessons. Meeting all of us after the lessons was pretty good and we had fun discovering the city and its night life , pubs and more activities the course offered us.

At the end, what people remenber is the good atmosphere extent by good relationships and this was a real success, not only for the teacher we met but also for the good vibes in our group, the special  links we have done for the work togehter in our high school. I have been very lucky sharing this experience with Marta, Valentín, Antonio and specially to Ana, who has made this dream come true. Thanks for these delicious days together in Cardiff.

Thanks  my friends ...💔💜💚💛

BEAUTIFUL SINGING BY A MALE VOICE CHOIR

 During our stay in Cardiff we were lucky to enjoy the rehearsal of one of the many male voice choirs in the city. It was a unique experience. It is a group of men between 25... and 92 years of age! They gather together every Tuesday to rehearse the songs they will eventually offer at different celebrations or festivals. The fact is that Wales has been profoundly linked to music and poetry for ages. 

The origin of these choirs goes back to three centuries ago within the Methodist Church, as part of its celebrations, but within time, they became a way of getting together for Welsh miners after a hard day's work. Hard miners were soft at heart!

Welsh people are very open, friendly and curious. They even consider themselves rather nosy! While we were waiting for them to get ready for the show, two members of the choir were chatting with us, willing to ask us about the traditions and way of life in the different countries that the teachers assisting the rehearsal came from.

Only accompanied by a piano, we saw the young conductor leading such a nice band of enthusiastic voices. And we got goosebumps!

It is traditional for the men to have a drink in a nearby pub to soothe their throats after the effort. We shared that moment with them, which was the perfect ending to a wonderful and emotional evening.

DAMOS A CONOCER NUESTRO PROYECTO

  Uno de los objetivos de nuestro proyecto es hacer que toda la localidad conozca y se sienta participe de los proyectos que el IES Berenguela de Castilla lleva a cabo para la mejora de la educación de sus hijos.

El periódico y la radio locales es uno de nuestros medios para difundir nuestro proyecto.

CONTENIDOS DEL CURSO 2

 En el curso también hemos aprendido a usar otras herramientas para "Android" para lograr la creación de diferentes materiales y actividades que pretenden motivar a nuestro alumnado.

 

 

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 Inshot:
es una app que se puede descargar, sin costo, al celular. Está disponible para iOS y Android y es muy fácil de usar. El primer paso consiste en añadir el o los videos que se quieran editar. ... Hay variosgráficos que ya están integrados a la app, sino es posible adquirir paquetes de stickers

 

 Animator:
Haz videos animados, GIFs y divertidos garabatos en solo unos simples pasos — ¡no se necesitan conocimientos avanzados!

RUGBY IN WALES

 One of the activities we did during our stay in Cardiff was visiting a Rugby Pitch.

 

Rugby is not just a sport in Wales, it is also part of Welsh culture. Just walking through the Cardiff streets, you can realise that rugby is a way of living. The Millennium Stadium, known since 2016 as the Principality Stadium for sponsorship reasons, is the national stadium of Wales. Located in Cardiff, it is the home of the Wales national rugby union team and has also held Wales national football team matches.

 

Rugby was created in the mid-19th century at British universities. It is said to have originated at Rugby School in Warwickshire, England, in 1823 when during a game of football, William Webb Ellis decided to pick up a ball and go with it. However, a historian claims he has proof that Rugby was first played in Wales - and had nothing to do with William Webb Ellis or the town that gave the game its name. Dr Russell Rhys, from near Newport in South Wales, is trying to rewrite the history books.

 

Nowadays there are several variations of this sport, the best known is the compound by 15, 13 or 7 players but there are others like beach, touch, wheelchair, or underwater rugby.

Rugby helped create Welsh nationhood. When the game took hold in the last years of the 19th century and thrived in the first years of the 20th, Wales embraced this relatively new sport because it gave a small nation the chance to be on top of the world.

Wales has a successful national team that is currently ranked 4th in the world according to the world rugby ranking. These successes from the team have made the sport popular in the country. The people in Wales also love playing the game and currently, there are 79,800 registered rugby players, something really amazing in a 3 million people country.

 

The nickname of the national team is Wales Dragons. Many rugby teams from around the world have another name by which they are more well known. These are not always official names, and some national teams have more than one nickname.

If you travel to Wales, do not lose the opportunity to visit the Millennium Stadium to watch the Dragons. You will remember that atmosphere forever.