Thursday, July 23, 2009

Speed boat trip in Cardiff

Wales, which had 2.9 million population in 2001 census, is one of the countries in the United Kingdom. Cardiff is its capital city. When I got there, I felt I was in a foreign country. I think the Welsh people look slightly different from English with more rounded face. The Welsh language is what I can't predict what it means. But we can still use English. Basically Wales is a really nice place to me.


Welsh flag


An example of Welsh



We are on 5240 feet long Severn bridge . on M4 motor way to Wales


Here are some photos of Cardiff Bay


A swan diving for fish or what I never know.

This speed boat attracted me to buy a ticket for next trip

ready to take a ride, nice


We were just boarding


We're just leaving the harbour.

In a couple of minutes, the boat got faster with a loud music. I thought it was flying over the surface of water. Sometime it jumped. Many occasions, it turned suddenly. We all screamed.

At the end of the trip, I had to wait for a few minutes my hearing and balance to come back. But I was really a nice experience.

For those interested in some Wales photos.

Anyway, I can tell Wales is not my country.

Sunday, July 19, 2009

Clay, Pool, Hardy and A Harbour

This morning, I was doing a minute research about clay as an attempt to find out the history of the Blue Pool encouraged me to do so.

Ball clays are kaolinitic sedimentary clays, that commonly consist of 20-80% kaolinite, 10-25% mica, 6-65% quartz. They are fine-grained and plastic in nature. They are mined in Devon and Dorset in England. They are commonly used in the construction of many ceramic articles.

The ceramic use of ball clays in Britain dates back to at least the Roman era. More recent trade began when clay was needed to construct tobacco pipes in the 16th and 17th century.

The name "ball clay" is believed to derive from the time when the clay was mined by hand. It was cut into 15 to 17-kilogram cubes and during transport the corners of the cubes became rounded off leaving "balls".

It can be said that the Blue Pool is one of the historic places of past time clay business.
The Blue Pool is a lake in the Furzebrook Estate, a 25 acres (100,000 m2) park of heath woodland and gorse near Furzebrook in Dorset, England.

The pool is a flooded, disused clay pit where Purbeck Ball Clay was dug from the 1600s to the early 1900s to make smoking pipes and tea pots.

I must say the place was amazing. Well maintained. At the same time, it looked natural. Tall pine trees were growing well, beautifully guarding the blue lake. Birds were singing. It is claimed that there are wild animals inhabited , such as rabbits, badgers, squirrels, deer and sand lizards. It was drizzling. So I did not have a full range of chance to explore the area.


A request for the wood ant. British people are kind enough to save ants and their work.

An ant nest (British wood ants there)
The color of water ,which is varying from green to blue, is due to clay particles.
Pine trees

You can see the Blue Pool photos I took yesterday.

Well, I went to Hardy's home before going to Blue Pool. To be honest, I did not know Thomas Hardy until a friend of mine from Bath mentioned about his name and novels last month.

Thomas Hardy(2 June 184011 January 1928) was an English novelist and poet of the naturalist movement, although in several poems he displays elements of the previous romantic and enlightenment periods of literature, such as his fascination with the supernatural.

This is what he was described in wikipedia.

According to the Thomas Hardy society founded in 1968, he was born at Higher Bockhampton near Dorchester. During his lifetime he composed nearly a thousand published poems and wrote fourteen publised novels including ‘Far From the Madding Crowd’ and ‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles’. He died in Dorchester on 11 January 1928. Much of Thomas Hardy's work is based on Wessex, the South and West of England.

Unfortunately, when I got to Hardy's cottage, where he was born and raised, now under the management of the National Trust, it was found out that the small museum was not open for the public. For some reason, opening days are from Monday to Thursdays and Sunday only, what I leaned later. Why not on Saturday? Still misery. Anyway, I had a chance to walk around nice and quiet surrounding woodland area. I saw some families with their dogs enjoying the place like me.

Hardy's cottage

cute tiny wild fruits, close-up view (ရႊန္းမီအတြက္လက္ေဆာင္)

Here are some more photos of Thomas Hardy's birthplace.

After visiting above two places, I headed to Poole harbour to take boat photos. As it has been 6 PM, all deep sea boat services had already finished.




Reference:
http://www.bluepooltearooms.co.uk/index.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hardy
http://www.hardysociety.org/

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Evening walk

Walking under the sun with temperature well over 35C was the hell. When I was teens, my parents managed me to walk to school on foot for many reasons. I did not have a choice. It was a pain. It may be a funny thing. But it is true that one of the reasons I moved to England was that I really hated tropical sunshine. I have been traumatised by sun in Burma, not by military government.

In England, I do not need to walk in that way. Really nice. I am still not keen to walk. I may run. I may swim. I may ride a bike. But I did not go out for walking at all.

This evening is different. I did take 30 minute walk around my house, exploring surrounding area. Here are some photos.


Wild rose


Roadside flower


Name?


White flower ( I dont know its name)


A cottage


a farm


a stream passing under the mill


phone booth "Coin not accepted"


a pub


church entrance


Only church in this village. It is constructed from flint and stone and has a Norman chancel arch with a 16th century nave.





an old organ for Sunday service


Graveyard with recent funeral service. It looks congested. Maybe not enough fund. Personally I would like to lie in a decent space of land.


An old graveyard


church lane

Carpeting and Sunbathing

Since last spring, I had decided not to go abroad this summer after I was fed up with flight schedules, hotel deals and unexpected expenses that I experienced in my last trip. During my this short break, I just stayed at home. I did enjoyed lots of barbecue and wines. It was really nice until yesterday.

When I got up at 8, I was shocked to find out that the whole downstairs was flooded. The whole kitchen, the whole living room. The carpets and rugs had been underwater. I had to try to calm down myself first. The leak was from the connection point at washing machine. After securing it, I had to start very tiring carpet replacement. I removed all wet carpets. And I rushed to nearby Allied carpet. Fortunately, the one I like was on 30% off although it was still not so cheap for me as £7.45 per square meter. I finished carpeting this morning, gaining a new experience, but leaving me with some ache and pain as I had to moved all furnitures.

My house has already been equipped with smoke alarm and carbon monoxide detector. After this incident, I was thinking to get anti-flood alarm if available at market :)


new carpet in kitchen


kitchen


Living room carpet.


view from rear garden while sunbathing.


a pigeon watching at me


under the blue sky I was doing sunbathing (I miss you darling)


Wild fruits


Next door neighbours trying to make friendship with me

Monday, July 13, 2009

Nearby beach

Summer time means more people going out. Beaches, holiday camps and caravan sites have been busy places. At the same time, there is a noise pollution with rescue helicopters flying over my area.

For me, I don't have too much chance to enjoy sunshine due to my work and education commitments. My organizer shows that most weekends have got full of appointments, on-call duties and "to do tasks". But last weekend, I was able to manage to go to nearby beach, where I spend one hour time. Here are some photos sharing.


Jurassic coast


A sea gull


I deliberately avoided people in my photos .




Dogs also enjoyed summer


ရႊန္းမိ ေမးဘူးလို႕ လမ္းေဘးကပန္းပံုတင္လိုက္တယ္။ Englandက ဒီအခ်ိန္ဆိုေနရာတိုင္း မွာပန္းေတြေတြ႕ႏိုင္တယ္။ ေပါက္ တို႕ ေမျမိဳ႕လိုေပါ့



feeding myself in that evening


fed a bird as well