What a fun day out to The Mumbles and Swansea. Sarah and I went to meet a couple of her friends and after we'd met, we drove out to Mumbles, checking out the view from a couple of spots and wandering along the coastal path until it was too cold to go any further.
We then headed into Verdi's for an excellent lunch. We walked along the bay and found a geo-cache then turned back towards the car and called via Joe's ice-cream parlour
This is a caramel sundae with welsh cake flavoured ice-cream!
Met a colourful group of gentlemen on a stag do, dressed as wrestlers from the 80's! They were cheered on and beeped by traffic wherever they went!
We then drove back into the main part of Swansea and walked along the front without a strong sense of where we were
We walked by the marina which was pretty and somewhere I always enjoy being to see the boats and hear the wind rattling the spinnakers.
We headed into the main part of the city, finding lots of places we never knew existed from our limited experience of walking from the train station to our placements last year. Came across a rather quaint place that looked like an old fashioned tea shop at the front, turned into a pleasant antiquey pub then degenerated into a loutish bar at the end.
It was here that one of the guys starting telling us about a very random friend of his who has put together words and had them bound in what, ordinarily, would be called a book. He has called it his autobiography but as our mate told us, he's really boring! And he can't write. And there is no punctuation. And the spelling is abysmal. He said he could have brought copies for us! It was very funny hearing him say exactly how candidly he told his friend that no-one would want to hear his drivel about going out dancing with his mate Dave! He asked if we wanted to speak to the author as he had his number on his phone!
At some point through our coffee-drinking, our same friend announced, à propos nothing, that he has twice been bitten by a dwarf! Yes. That's two times! Of course we are laughing pretty hard already. The first time, apparently, he was in a club. I asked what on earth he had said to upset him. 'Nothing' our friend says defensively. 'I was just dancing round him and asked how you doing lil' fella?' Sometimes when I'm laughing so much I cough violently as I try to catch my breath. This was one such occasion.
We had a little more general social chatter about work and ambitions. Our same friend again comes out with a classic. 'My Dad's an inventor. He was on Tomorrow's World'. We ooh-ed appropriately and asked what he had invented. Seems he created a different type of feeding bottle based around a valve that you can find in a football. Sounded interesting and we asked how it had gone down. Boots had sold a couple of thousand and he made a bit of money. Not bad, we think, for a claim to fame. Then he delivers another knock-out revelation. 'Yeah', he says reflectively, 'babies started getting sick'. Now sick babies is no laughing matter but our friend's dead straight honesty just made us howl! Somehow it was just what we ought to have guessed would happen. He also had to give back all the money he'd made. Then he painfully re-enacted the frustration he had with not being able to pump up his football anymore and how he would kick it against the wall then go and pick it up to bring it back to kick again because there was no air in it!!
We then walked back over to the Marina for dinner. There was a fantastic Chinese place there with really authentic food. The menu was terrifying! Pig intestines, duck neck, frogs leg... We liked the idea of a Korean BBQ which is a portable affair where you cook your own food on a two tiered hot plate. Unfortunately it was £20 and I decided against it as it was the week before a holiday. I had a tofu & seafood dish that was quite soupy but delicious.
The guys opted for the hot pot which is an eat-all-you-can deal. You are given unlimited amounts of meat, seafood, noodles and vegetables to dip into two different sauces. One is mild, the other very spicy and they sit on a hot plate on your table.
They ate a phenomenal amount of food! I got to taste a few bits and pieces. It was excellent. One of the things that most impressed us was that we were the only three and a half non-Asians in there. It said a lot that the clientele, after us, was exclusively Chinese.
This is the No No Smoking sign which in itself is amusing. However, it was on a door that our table was butted against.
Half way through the meal one of the staff came over and awkwardly excused himself, leant behind us, opened the door, made us drag our table with boiling sauces on a hot plate away from the door while he rummaged inside for something. The whole thing was pretty funny but of course we'd been laughing all afternoon so it seemed even funnier than if it had been an isolated incident.
I'm definitely going back for the Korean BBQ some time. Those dwarf/invention/biography stories haven't finished being laughed about!
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