on Cardiff

My job entails visiting lots of odd places. In continental Europe, I generally attend meetings in or at least near major capitals : Paris, Moscow, Madrid, etc.
For some reason however (tax cuts would be my guess) in Britain, these events inevitably seem to take place in odd places far from London, where no one would ever go unless they had, as I do, a specific meeting to attend. In such a way I have come to spend time in places I didn’t even know existed, and have accordingly seen many parts of the United Kingdom I never would have ventured to otherwise. I have to say that many of these destinations (Slough, Basingstoke, Solihull) have been rather grim industrial places filled with chavs in track suits and seemingly endless call centres. But none of the random places I have been to in England and Scotland prepared me for Wales!
If I have time, I generally google the place I am headed to before I get on the train, normally for practical reasons: taxi drivers don’t always know where places are and I like to have a map ready to show them just in case. So the weekend before I headed off to Cardiff, I typed the name of the place in to the search bar on Flickr. This brought up the excellent, albeit highly disturbing collection of photos by X X, which seems to present Cardiff as a hard living place of people vomiting into fountains and pissing in the middle of the road as cops looked on. It made my ancestral hometown of Glasgow, normally known for its alcoholism and violence, as a calm and peace loving place. I was a bit suspicious. In my ignorant mind, Wales conjured up images of sheep and harsh waves hitting jagged rocks in sheeting rain. But stereotypes can be deceiving, clearly. I innocently asked a couple of colleagues who had been there what there impressions were. One described it as “the wild West” and another said it was one of the scariest places he had ever been. I remained unimpressed and waited to see some sheep.
Upon arrival however, there was little mystery as to what led to the graphic images on Flickr. The main street in Cardiff (and there really only is one, with a lovely view of the Castle at the end) featured several pubs offering pints for 75p, which is the cheapest beer I have ever seen in Britain. For £1.99 you could even get ham and chips to go with your drink. By afternoon, people were bottling each other in the middle of the street, drunk out of their senses. This was a Wednesday, I shutter to image what Friday night must look like. My colleague and I wandered around the town centre somewhat baffled. We stopped to look at the jobs being advertised in the window of a recruitment agency (lots of call centres paying £7 per hour). We then looked at the weekend away tours on offer in a travel agency, which featured three types of holidays: 1) Eurodisney 2) all you can drink weekends away to Belgium 3) follow the Welsh rugby team around Europe!
I suppose that says a lot.