What I learned in the Land of Song
“The Irish are chatty. The English are snobby. The Scottish are angry. But the Welsh are friendly,” explained my Moroccan Uber driver.
He had spent the last few decades in London and Cardiff. We had around 30 minutes to go before we reached my grandma Rosalynda’s hometown—Abertillery, one of the communities in the Ebbw Fach valley.
I nodded in agreement. Yeah, there was some confirmation bias. As someone with Welsh heritage, it’s nice to hear compliments about my people.
But what he said matched my experience in Wales’s capital and the Vale of Glamorgan.
A picture of Dinas Powys.
Everyone was kind.
Like, I bought the wrong type of train ticket before riding for four hours. I should have been given a huge fine. No problem. The guards at a busy station gave me a significant discount on the right one, asked where I was going, and wrote down detailed directions for me on paper.
I didn’t book a place to stay until a few hours before I got to Wales. Didn’t matter. My AirBNB host, a retired grandmother who’s traveled the world, spent an hour talking to me about the state of American politics and served me a continental breakfast—above and beyond what was promised.
I tried to get reservations to a nice restaurant in town, but a pipe had burst. Not an issue. A young gentleman working next door took his time to help me figure out what happened. I joined him for a meal. He spent a good 30 minutes (during his shift on a busy night) asking about my experience in business school and his ideas for new bicycle bottle-holders.
When I stopped by another pub on his recommendation, the bartender explained the history of the area before I bought a single drink.
A brother-and-sister pair asked about my accent (they thought I was Danish or Canadian) and spent another two hours sharing stories about Welsh slang, politics, and piemaking.
As we spoke, a recently divorced gentleman who looked and talked like Billy Butcher from The Boys joined us. We spent another hour outside talking about economic opportunity, Rick and Morty, and raising kids.
Literally everyone I spoke with there offered to buy me a drink.
Five stars.
“How would you describe a Welshman?” I asked them all.
Honest, they said. Straightforward. Funny.
“We’ve been screwed so many times by the English, we have to develop a thick skin. And if the world laughs at us, we should learn to laugh at ourselves.”
I told them I was going to see Abertillery. “Valley people over there are different,” they mused. Then they laughed that 30 miles of distance created different accents and ways of life and went back to chatting about Invincible and the war in Ukraine.
One woman opined she preferred it when men told women what to do, so long as women had veto power over every decision. Another gentleman asked me about my time in Kyoto; we had to look up Akira Toriyama’s age when the talk turned to Dragonball. “We’re all kind of weird,” Billy Butcher explained.
So am I.
I won’t call myself Welsh so readily—frankly, I struggled to understand some of my new friends’ accents. None of them would call me that, either. I’m an American, born and raised, and my Jewish upbringing emphasized a love of reading, a sense of humor, and the importance of helping people who need it informs my daily actions more than the Welsh lovespoon or language.
But I felt at home.
Also, nobody mispronounced my name.
That’s why what I saw in Abertillery was so saddening.
As my Uber driver explained, my grandma’s hometown used to be a thriving mining community. When Margaret Thatcher attempted to break up organized labor, she went after coal miners. Her policies gutted the industry. Under what was framed as an understandable call for more environmentalism, she shattered the power of Welsh unions.
Towns like Abertillery lost their economic leverage.
Then, most of their population.
When I arrived, I felt it firsthand.
It was Sunday, so I understood most things being closed—but there was barely anybody to be seen. One mom and her child walked through the town’s center—that was it. I asked them where folks were. They said that the people who are still here mostly keep to themselves.
The library.
As I gazed around fading posters and shuttered stores, a former miner greeted me. He said that he had moved in for cheaper rent, but was moving out as soon as he could get a job in Cardiff.
He recommended I go to western Wales, where he’s from, because the folks there in the southeast aren’t nearly as helpful or down-to-earth.
After a 30-minute talk, he apologized if he made me uncomfortable at all (he hadn’t!) and joked that the rain stopped just so we could chat.
On the way back, I thought about my time with the most welcoming people I had met. It’s hard to imagine people more helpful and kind than the Welsh. They were unfiltered in a way that I wish I could be.
I hope that advancements in information processing make it easier to sift through reams of records to help people find where they came from. I know it’s hard to trace your family roots—especially if war or slavery disrupted your lineage—but I think everyone should. There’s compelling new research on tracing the genealogy of African Americans and families that survived the Holocaust.
Communication is more than sharing who we are. We must help people understand how we got here.
