well well wale...: some Welsh beauty

all right, so this will be the first installment of what i am hoping will be many trip reviews of Wales. and this one, will be a photo entry more than anything else.
let me introduce this by saying that since i have arrived, people have been telling me that the beaches here are beautiful. so beautiful that one of them won the best beach in europe award. so i nod, and i smile, and i say wow, but inside i am thinking, whatever, there is no way anything here compares to california. these brits must be crazy. anyways, so a week and a half ago i decided that i needed to see some green, some fresh non-city air. so i managed to get my only friend with a car to drive me, herself (susanne) and claire (the irish) to Gower, the lower southwestern corner of Wales that happens to be a peninsula. its not far, but it would be far via public transport as the nearest city is the relatively famous Swansea, but after that - its the Gower peninsula which is still very farm-ish and even though it enjoys a good amount of tourism, still has maintained its old school charm. we arrived in an area that was full of grass, speckled with cow crap (for good measure...) and berries. everywhere - blackberries. and they were yum. so i trailed behind the girls as we walked towards the cliffs, making sure that i'll enjoy a good berry-ache that evening. the trail was quite easy and full of very pasty british folks walking athletically, or at least pretending. when we reached the cliffs - the horizon that opened in front of us was incredible. the water was this crystalline blue, the greenness of the cliffs mixed with the brown bronze of the rocks and the yellow-orangeness of the sand. it was quite beautiful.

(remark: while i look pretty cool down there on the edge of the cliff, if i can say so myself (which i will - in fact, already did!!!), in truth, i only went down there because a runaway clementine decided to roll down the cliffs and got stuffed by a welsh bush)

following the cliffs to the right of the pictures, which was east, led us to a beach called 'three cliffs bay'. if you look closely, you can kind of see a dragon. and i mean kind of. but still.
the water = very cold. the sand = very soft. the tan = what tan?

and of course, every spot in wales has some old castle that has remained from sometime ago and some legend associated with it (the one for this one had to do with a fairy princess marrying a commoner, who then proceeded to get drunk and him and his friends saw lights coming to the party and ambushed them, thinking they were enemies, but of course it was the fairy contingency, so the fairy king said that they will be covered with sand from then and on)

from there we went on to rhossili beach (sounds italian, admit it!!!). this is on the eastern edge of the peninsula, kind of close to ireland - though you can't see ireland from there. and this is where the surfing happens. again, i was quite dubious - and as opposed to the beaches, i remain at least somewhat dubious. the waves i saw would be the equivalent of bathtub waves. seriously. a rubber duckie would not be threatened by these.
anyway, so the size was small, but as they say... the shape was beautiful and the break clean and long. so i can see that if there were some bigger waves, that would be quite a good beach to surf on.
the southern edge of the beach is cut by cliffs which extend far into the sea. the end of this extension is called worm head - and i can kind of see the worm head from the game worms... though no body shared this sentiment with me, i'll hold down the fort. its actually kind of cool to hike there as there are only certain hours in which you can cross to worm head - other times the tide is too strong and its dangerous. supposedly, people die there every year.