The Manor Hotel

Zooport

by antistar

I had to taint myself with Newport on the way to a meeting with the PGCE course leader at the University of Wales, which unfortunately happens to be based in Gwent. Fortunately my prospective department is based outside the city, but the place has fallen to the bottom of my list of choices as there is a frightening possibility I might have to live in the hell hole, as places in the beautiful and relaxed Caerleon are, not surprisingly, limited.

On arrival at Newport I was a bit sleepy and wasn't totally sure it was the right station. I witnessed a dirty brown urban sprawl and decided it had potential, but when I saw the forlorn scrawling on the roof of a corrogated iron shack of "zooport", I knew I had reached my destination. I imagine the graffiti had been written by an ex-pat, trapped amongst the neaderthal Welsh valley boys that seem to inhabit the city. They were very much the animals the name suggested, half human and half creature; the exact constitution of the good half of the pairing was difficult to discern, it may have been dog.

The women weren't much better, hideous in-breds smeared and caked with layers of what looked like flour and blood. They all swarmed together around the city centre shops, that suffered window breakages with unnerving regularity. If the windows weren't broken, they often just didn't exist and were boarded up with cardboard or a tattered bit of curtain; sometimes entire sections were closed off. "Accommodation" one pub optimistically advertised, with the whole top floor windows blacked out with a chip-board that displayed the corrosive rising damp forming inside.

The only thing about the place that I liked were the quaint, but almost entirely useless, dual language signs in every shop, street and station. The whole thing is a waste of money, as practically noone in south Wales speaks a word of Welsh, and have even been known to rebel violently when their home street gets the Cymru treatment. The signs serve no purpose other than to remind the visiting English that they are, in fact, in Wales, and that their accent will be noticed and looked upon with extreme scorn. I was nervous about opening my mouth to say anything, especially when the more ferocious looking creatures were lurking nearby.

Honestly, go to Cardiff instead.