Paris to Helsinki: Into The West

This week has certainly been both an improvement and a change of attitude for me. I gave myself a break during the weekend, so I spent the time watching a lot, and I mean a lot, of movies. Since this week is reading week, I would normally have the week off to do what I wanted. This year however, they have given us a module enrichment day which is compulsory attend and usually takes up the entire day. For my module 'cultural diversity in education' we had the opportunity to go to cardiff by coach and visit a synagogue and a mosque, respectively.

We left from the university at 7:30am on Tuesday morning and made our way toward Cardiff, which in the end took 3.5 hours. We arrived at the synagogue and we were given a very insightful lecture on judaism from a rabbi. I learned a lot of interesting facts about the religion that I had not known before and I developed a newfound respect for their traditions and livelihood. We made our way back on the coach and headed towards the mosque only to arrive too early. In the meantime I headed over to Cardiff Bay and took lots of photos of the lovely view. At around 1pm, we went to the mosque and were asked to take our shoes off and headed into their prayer room. We had another interesting talk on what we already knew about islam and what we wanted to know. I learned a lot about the religion and understood the peacefulness of their intentions and how the media does not portray islam in a particularly favourable light.

We were then given a few hours to ourselves in the city, in which case I went shopping for some new trousers from Zara. I also went to M&S to buy some food for the journey home. At 5pm we left Cardiff and made our way back to Aberystwyth. Sitting on the left hand side of the coach, I had the pleasure of watching the sunset in the west which was an absolutely beautiful view. We arrived back in Aberystwyth at 8.30pm and I had a quick meal and went straight to bed.