As I type this entry I'm sitting on my balcony at Celtic Manor Resort in Newport, Wales overlooking the golf course on which the Ryder Cup is played. I traveled 17.5 hours to get here, arrived yesterday at 10 am local time, and promptly slept 8 hours. Later tonight I'll play a $20,000 6 player winner take all sit-n-go tournament 40 minutes down the road in Cardiff. I'm actually still unsure with whom I'll be playing. I've been told that as the online qualifier I'll be playing with 3 Full Tilt red pros and 2 other people who will buy in. The structure won't be great, and I fully anticipate having to flip it all off at some point. The tournament will be filmed and shown on British television's channel 4. I'll also make the youtube link available when it comes out in a couple months.

Truth be told, I won this satellite on Full Tilt quite accidentally. I bought into the $600 satellite a couple months ago thinking it was their standard WSOP satellite, and realized an hour into the tournament that it was a package to this sit-n-go. Hopefully I can win tonight and be $120,000 richer. Last night I had a great seafood dinner consisting of Fish Soup and a Swordfish entree at a place called Priory here in town. I did a little walking around then headed down to the more "posh" (as the Brits call it) Cardiff Bay area for some drinks.

Some observations:

Everything is expensive here. Honestly it makes Vegas seem cheap.

I've been getting vigged hard on the exchange fees. Last night I converted $500 at the front desk and only got 275£. The spot rate indicated I should've gotten 330£.

The most average looking woman in Wales is probably only half as attractive as the most average looking woman in The States. Still, there's something to be said about how subtly attractive many of the British girls are.

Several people have asked if my accent is Australian, wtf.

The currency is tilting me hard. Anything up to 2£ is a coin, and I'm too lazy to reach in my pocket and sort through them. As a result I came home last night with a pocketful of coins since I kept breaking the paper bills. I would for sure lose a ton of money here if I misplaced/lost coins at the same frequency as I do in the US.