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'In planning the trip it had seemed to make sense to spend this first night in Cardiff. Was it not the largest city of Wales? The Capital City? It did not concern us at first that we had never talked to anyone who had ever been to Cardiff. So what if the city looked unprepossessing upon our entrance by rail? Wasn't that par for the course of railway routes? And so what if we encountered the same problem of stairs to get from the train to the taxi stand? And so what if there was no taxi there? One would surely come along by and by. Besides, we knew that we'd be soon ensconced in the Angel Hotel, which our Fodor guidebook informed us was unquestionably Cardiff's best, with recently renovated, high ceilinged rooms of bright pastel colors. The renovation of the Angel Hotel, when we finally reached it, however, was incomplete. Its entire entrance and facade were under construction. This meant we had to carry our bags a block through and around all manner of scaffolding. There was no doorman. No bellman. It was hard for us to discern whether the young woman receptionist was speaking Brythonic or gum chewing Cockney. The concierge desk at the other end of the grand foyer had clearly been vacant since the turn of the century. The elevator did not work. Carrying our bags up the palatial staircase, we finally arrived at our seventeen foot ceilinged nest. Its other dimensions were ten by ten. The walls were pastel brown. If the room had been renovated, the results vaguely reminded us of Calcutta. It was hot and stuffy. We threw open our our second story window that looked out, through the scaffolding, upon Cardiff's main and noisiest circle or circus. Our quarters were immediately filled with gasoline fumes. The cold I'd arrived with in London had turned into asthmatic bronchitis during our train ride and stair climbing. I unpacked antibiotics before anything else.
The hotel's sole redeeming feature was its central location-if the center of Cardiff could be considered redemptive in any fashion. It did mean that Cardiff Castle was just the other side of the circle surrounded by a large park. So after unpacking and a failed attempt at a nap, we went for a walk. The park was as littered as Paddington Station. Its shrubbery was desperately in need of pruning. Those few paths that were paved and cracked and growing crops of weeds. We could discern that it had once been a fine park, just as the Angel had once been a fine hotel. It is sad to see a poor city. It is sadder still to see one that had originally been wealthy. It was clear to us not only that Cardiff was deep in an economic 'recession' but that that it had been in it for decades.
Around the square castle was a four-sided moat. Three sides were dry. The other , at its bottom, contained a modicum of parasitic sludge. From the outside, the castle itself was remarkable only because of its phoniness. In fact, Fodor told how most of it had been built by donations in late Victorian times so as to look like a medieval castle. The external result was colorfully ersatz. As to its inside, we cannot attest since there was an entrance fee.
But that was just the beginning of of the problem. We wouldn't have entered Cardiff castle if it had been for free. The real problem, we realised, was that we wouldn't pay an entrance fee to get into hardly any castle, no matter how ancient, authentic or historical it might be, or palace or museum. It began to dawn on us that we had stumbled into a potential predicament of alarming proportions.
We returned to the Angel where, because there seemed no better place in town, we ate a progressively inedible dinner. We attempted to console ourselves that the despair we were experiencing was the result of very temporary culture shock, which we would soon get over. After all, what else could be expected in entering a land where people spoke Brythonic? Croeso i Gymru? But as we finally drifted off to sleep, amid the noise and the fumes, we seriously wondered whether this trip had been even a slightly rational decision on our parts.'
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Passage taken from the above book which I borrowed from Cardiff 'Super Duper' Central Library.
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