How Green was my Valley

 
Woke this morning to this amazing view from my bedroom window of the Welsh valley below me.
 
Where is it? Well it’s a hotel on the outskirts of Crickhowell with links to Mount Everest. Yes, that’s right, it’s the Manor hotel, birthplace of George Everest, surveyor general for the British Army, the man whom Mount Everest is  named after.
 
How about this for an astonishing story.
On checking in to the  hotel I noticed the young girl, Alina Reis, on the reception desk had a foreign accent and I could not place it.
 
“Where are you from?”
“Bosnia”.
Later Aina told me her life story. This is mini version of it.
 
 “I did not see daylight until I was six years of age. We all lived in the basement of our house for three years because of the Bosnian war. When I came out I saw the bright daylight and I kept blinking, the world seemed so unreal, and there were all these dead bodies covered in blood lying around…’
 
Time passed and she grew up, trained as a physiotherapist and moved to Australia.
 
There she met a young man and together they decided to find a job in Europe so that they would be closer to their families.
 
They saw a job on the internet in Wales and applied.
“I could not believe it when the taxi drew up in Llandovery, a town of some 500 people, I said where are the people where are the shops? There was nothing. I cried and cried. It was so different from Sydney.”
 
They stayed for two months then moved to Crickhowell…. So it is story with a happy ending.