750,000+ people speak Welsh.

611,000 of those people live in Wales. I love the Welsh. I love a lot of people and things, like amigurumi, 1940s london, and Magic the Snow imp (France's olympic mascot in 92 or something). They make me happy and in some moods that's enough and in other moods I have to act on my love and make something(http://s167.photobucket.com/albums/u138/pocketfork/?action=view&current=P1010100.jpg) or, in the case of Welsh, sign up for a Rosetta Stone online course.

My love for the Welsh has to do with Dragons and tea and Catherine Zeta Jones and pound coins, and I have never really analyzed it. It is a cozy affection, not requiring attention or self reflection. Today, however, I checked on wikipedia to find out what I'm getting into and it was the tiniest bit horrifying. Here are some little sentences. If you want to offer someone tea (see! I told you, cozy and warm!) in North Walian it's "Dach chi isio panad?", in South Walian it's "Dych chi moyn dishgled?", and in literary Walian (which I assume won't come up very soon), it's "A oes arnoch eisiau cwpanaid o de?".

But the good news is another girl at school has just signed up for it and so we can offer each other tea and so on as practice. And if I get overwhelmed I can imagine little london schoolchildren's short pants with tall socks and try to remember the names of the fuwa, mascots of the Beijing Olympics 2008. So far all I can remember is Jing Jing the panda.