Rah: [noun]- A posh twat.

There are so many other definitions for Rah but I couldn't resist the succinctness of that one.  More on Rahs in a bit.

This past weekend I went to Northern Wales.  When I told my flat mates I was going to Wales the general reaction was "Why would you ever want to go to Wales?" so I was a touch nervous that I had made a terrible mistake in deciding to go there.  Luckily, I found some pretty good reasons for wanting to go to wales.

1. It's beautiful in a British Columbia/South Keys/Grand Bend/Nova Scotia sorta way.

Taken in the town of Conwy

Taken in the town of Llandudno

2. There are 600 castles in Wales.

Conwy Castle

3. You know how I obsessively wrote about the artist Turner here? Wales must have been his point of inspiration.

Llandudno

4. Animals everywhere!

Horses on our walk to Aber Falls

 The sheep above and below are from Aled's Sheep Farm

Back to Rahs and there relevance to this post.  Me, Andy and Hannah all went on this trip together and it was organized by a company called Don't Be A Tourist.  At one point on this trip, we got into a conversation with our tour guide (kind of gives us away as tourists, right?) about hipsters.  Why? Nobody knows.  Anyways, we were trying to figure out what the British equivalent of a hipster is and seeing as our tour guide was a native to the lands of the UK, we thought he might know.  This lead to him explaining what a Rah was.  His definition was as follows: A rich girl from London, wears tights and Ugg Boots, has a massive purse on her arm, her cell phone in her hand and sounds like she's saying "Rah rah rah rah" when she talks.  I LOVE this definition.  I was curious to know elaborations on his definition so I looked it up at urbandictionary.com.  I highly suggest you do the same, the definitions are hilarious and so very accurate.  Apparently, according to our tour guide, Leeds is a hot bed for Rahs and their male counter part Rah Boys so knowing this word is key to my survival.

In summary, if you have the opportunity, go to Wales.

Knackered: [verb]- exhausted

Is what I was after watching/listening to eight hours of super awesome live music on Sunday!  This was the deal: on Sunday, November 14th Leeds University Union hosted this music festival called Constellations.  The initial draw for me was Broken Social Scene which is, seww ironic, a Canadian band.  I saw these bands in this order:

iLiKETRAiNS

Dam Mantle

Gold Panda

Liars

Local Natives

Los Campesinos!

Broken Social Scene

Basically it was the coolest thing I think I've ever done on a Sunday and we all know I'm always doing great things on Sundays soo you can't even imagine how cool this was (editor's note: I just realized that this may seem like I'm being serious because recently I have been doing great things on Sundays like being in Germany, but just to clarify that was a whole lotta sarcasm).  I have no pictures as of right now but I may have some later and I will post them then (cough Hannah cough cough).  The only low point in the day was when I realized that I had been standing for five hours and the only thing I had consumed in that time was alcohol.  That pesky alcohol keeps sneaking its way into my blog posts, I really don't know how it keeps doing that.  Anyways, I got chips and a non alcoholic (!?!?!?!) beverage and everything was fine.  Don't you feel like a better person for knowing that story? 

Düsseldorf: [noun]- the capital city of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia and center of the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region.

As my German ancestors would say, "guten tag!"  It has already been pointed out to me that Monday, the promised day of the next post in my previous post, has come and gone.  I beg for your forgiveness, or as my German ancestors would say, "sauerkraut."  As you can see, my German vocabulary has really expanded and become very accurate.  This is thanks to my weekend trip to Düsseldorf!  Me and my travelling buddies Andy and Hannah had a whirl wind adventure in the North Rhine this past weekend.

Turns out, there isn't a particularly large amount of stuff to do in Düsseldorf unless you want to drink beer (which, trust me, I did, I just don't have the photographic evidence) or spend a lot of money shopping.  However it was beautiful so we spent all of Saturday walking around the city and window shopping.  That last picture was our lunch and there was a delicious apple something or other that we had for dessert.  I would like to relive that half hour of eating every day of my life.

Because we saw and did everything there was to see and do in Düsseldorf in a very efficient manner on Saturday, we decide that we would take a train trip over to Köln/Cologne on Sunday morning and spend our day there.  So that's me on the train to Köln.  That train's final destination was in Switzerland which is more or less the coolest thing ever.  Actually, now that I think about it that was the first time I have ever been on a train where its final destination was in a different country from its initial destination.

Köln is home to a very impressive Cathedral.  I think there would be more Catholics in North America if someone could toss together a place of worship as impressive as this.  I would go to church just to hang out there.

We also climbed up the bell tower there which involved 97 meters of pure claustrophobia in a skinny, winding staircase with two way traffic.  The result of my hard work was entirely worth it.

German Quasimodo was just running around down below there, workin' the bells.  Swearsies.  He doesn't like his picture being taken though so I refrained mainly because that hunch back on the German version is worse.  And then there was the view.

We also covered a lot of ground in Köln.  We went to the Museum Ludwig, we ate a delicious meal, we saw this amazing instrumental band playing in an arcade with excellent acoustics and we also saw a Nutcracker workshop.

Apparently my Oma opened a restaurant in Köln in 1985 and she sat for the portrait for the sign.  Were you aware of this Dad?!

Temple Newsam: [noun]- a Tudor-Jacobean house with 1500 acres of land, in Leeds, West Yorkshire, England

I'm very sleepy and I have a big weekend ahead of me, which you will read all about on Monday, so this post is going to be short. I went to Temple Newsam today on a field trip.  It's beautiful and near perfection.  I read on one of the information mabobs that someone named Lord Darcy once owned it.  I pretend it was THE Mr. Darcy then I pretended I was Elizabeth Bennett and that I had travelled back to the time of Mr. Darcy then I realized that Pride and Prejudice is fiction and that I would have to break some sort of reality/fictional barrier instead of traveling through time for Mr. Darcy and I (aka Elizabeth Bennett, 21st century reality version) to plausibly meet.  If you couldn't already tell, it was a great day.

At the moment that last photo there makes me want to stab my eyes out but I know I'll appreciate it next year when I'm missing my casual day trips to country houses.

I would like to leave you with some baffling information:
I miss country music and sports that aren't "football." MY SASKATCHEWANIAN ROOTS CANNOT BE DENIED!