A weekend with the brotherhood

It’s been ages since I’ve posted anything. I guess that’s precisely what they meant when they said ‘life takes over’. 

Last weekend I did something extra-special - I spent a weekend with my three brothers. Although we do spend time together as a family, we had never spent an extended period of time (a weekend counts as an extended period of time with us) just the four of us. 

Elliot organised everything. He booked the car and drove us to Bath. We left on Friday evening in the rain but he did a good job. He loves to drive and I’m pretty useless at it while the other two don’t have their licence yet. So it all worked out well. (I foresee a fight over who will drive the day the other two get their licence). 

We arrived in Bath mid-evening in the most beautiful hotel! We were so excited about the spa that even though we were starving we went for a thermal bath before dinner. But one of the (many) things about city people is that we tend to forget that smaller cities do not, like London, function around the clock. Suffice to say we could not find a restaurant open and ended up having a kebab that we sneaked into the local pub. We had a debate about psychopaths and whether any of us would count as psychopaths and what it actually means to be a psychopath. That debate went no where and it was really late, so we decided to call it a night and went to bed. 

Tim and I had to start the next morning with another thermal bath and we were all shrivelled up by the time we made it out for our first meal of the day. 

Bath is such a beautiful city. It was packed with people, both old and young and the vibe is really nice because there are students everywhere. The Christmas market was not yet open which felt a bit like a tragedy, although Oliver is adamant that the tragedy is to talk about Christmas a WHOLE MONTH before Christmas. It’s not tough to see he’s been away from civilisation for a while!

Just in case we were not shrivelled enough, we then went to the town’s thermal bath. They have a roof top thermal pool which is very cool, except that it was so cold that getting in and out of the pool was a mission. When I got out I’m ashamed to say that I bumped every one of the way to get to my towel as fast as humanely possible. 

We headed to Cardiff in the evening. Now, Cardiff could not be any different from Bath if it tried. The moment we drove into town the bars were blasting with loud music. It was a rugby night. Having learned our lesson the previous night, we quickly checked in to our hotel and went back out determined to discover the city. 

We made it…to the bar opposite our hotel! In all fairness it had a nice heated terrace and we sat there, drinking and chatting. It’s fair to say we were the only people not drunk by 9pm. A young Welsh couple joined our table. They were pretty drunk but pretty fun too. They taught us a bit of Welsh, something like ‘fffssffkkkssss’ which we were told is a big insult, it means frog. (Well ‘fffssffkkkssss’ doesn't actually mean frog but whatever word they taught us did mean frog, and it sure sounded like ‘fffssffkkkssss’). 

We talked about what languages we had to learn in school and since they were inebriated I proceeded to make what I thought was a hilarious joke and told them we had to learn Gaelic in school. That’s because at that time I was convinced Gaelic was the name of the Welsh language. Saying it like that now seems really stupid but at the time it made sense and in my defence, the other three also thought that too. The girl was really shocked to hear we had to learn Gaelic, but then added that she had to learn Welsh which was hard too. That’s when everyone realised how bad my joke was. And how uncultured I was, and most certainly still am.

We then decided it was unacceptable to have only gone a few metres away from the hotel so we braved the rain (thanks storm Angus) and made it a few metres further down the road (you can’t blame us for not trying) into another bar, this time with a Hawaiian theme. 

While we sat and chatted, we were astonished to see how skilfully the bar staff managed to scoop up and clean every time someone vomited, which was fairly often. They had worked out an impressive system which was so efficient that if you didn't pay attention you wouldn’t know someone had just been sick. The best bit was that they’d automatically give a shot to the person right after. 

The next day, we went around Cardiff (we made it further than both pubs), visited the castle and went to the bay before heading back home. 

Some of the crazy/funny/embarrassing things that were overheard or said during the weekend: 

“That’s the furthest I’ve ever been without seeing a Pret a Manger” said by *someone* after having stepped a few metres outside the hotel 

“I thought Gaelic was Welsh” - I think you know who said that

“Maybe we should Wikipedia Wales” each one of said that at one point

“It looks like you’re about to climb the Alps” the Welsh guy said to Tim at the bar, commenting on his clothes

And of course...here's a short video from the trip: