After months and months of yammering on about it, my wife and I have finally moved and are now settling into our new lives in Cardiff, Wales.

If you are like me, you didn't pay a lot of attention in those high school European history classes, because the girl who sat just across from you had a habit of wearing tight sweaters. So, you may not know where Cardiff is.

We are just to the left of England. The people here are very quick to point out that we are not in England -- to suggest otherwise is a great way to find yourself sitting alone at the pub. Cardiff sits at the southwestern end of Wales, at the mouth of the Severn River.

Cities are organic things; they exist symbiotically with their inhabitants but very much have personalities of their own. Chicago is tough and friendly; New York is unstoppable; Cardiff is just a wee bit crazy.

All cities have crazy. In most places, the crazy is stationary. It sits on a street corner and shouts that the end is nigh while you hustle past and look the other way. In Cardiff, however, the insanity is mobile. It walks right up to you, gives you a hug and is eager to chat. The crazy here is healthy and congenial.

There is a man here known to locals as Ninja. He seems to think that he is either a prophet of God or a god himself. When the United Kingdom recently experienced the hottest day on record, he stood in the city centre and took all the credit.

If you were to portray such a person in a film, you would probably prop him up against a wall, dress him in rags and have him mumble, cough a lot and laugh manically for no reason. Instead, Ninja is a muscular, relatively handsome black man in his 30s with clean dreadlocks and the ability to speak in complete sentences. He walks right up to people and shakes their hand. He is a crazy that moves, that can follow you around.

Cardiff's mobile crazy is also evident in its drivers. The streets here, as with most British cities, are winding and small. The suburban Minnesota avenue that my parents live on -- where kids play basketball in the middle of the street -- is larger than the main roads here. Yet cars tear through this city as if it were all some sort of wacky sped-up Benny Hill chase sequence. I keep expecting to hear "Yakety Sax" over the roar of two-litre engines.

Cardiffians drive their Fiat Pandas (yes, it's a type of car) with a sense that their lives are predetermined: "If God wants me to die a horrible fiery death a Panda, then I will die a horrible fiery death in a Panda. And there's nothing I can do about it, whether I'm driving 20 mph or 90 mph. So, I might as well drive 90 mph."

My wife, Rachel, and I rented a car for our first few days in Cardiff, to allow us to purchase more stuff from IKEA than we could have carried on the bus. Whilst driving through town, we found it useful to scream constantly.

Me: "WHERE ARE WE?!"
Rachel: "HOW THE HECK SHOULD I KNOW?!"
Me: "YOU'RE THE ONE HOLDING THE MAP!"
Rachel: "THIS MIGHT AS WELL BE A MAP OF JAKARTA FOR ALL THE GOOD IT'S DOING ME!"
Me: "HERE COMES ANOTHER ROUNDABOUT! AAAAAAHHHH!"
Rachel: "AAAAAIIIIEEEEE!!!"

The crazy here even seems to have rubbed off on one of the world's largest and most respected media organizations, the British Broadcasting Corp. Its main Wales offices are just down the road from me.

Back home in the States, when I would tell people that I had taught myself to speak the Welsh language and was moving here to further study said language, reactions ranged from indifference to apathy. Here, though, they seem to have taken a little more interest.

Earlier this week, I was sitting in the beer garden of a local pub, when a woman walked up to me.

"Are you Chris Cope?" she asked.

"Yes," I said, because that is, in fact, who I am.

"Oh, good. I've been looking all over for you," she said. "I'm from the BBC. We had heard that you were here tonight, and I've been sent to get a quick interview."

The end result was this story. It remains a mystery, though, as to how she knew I was at the pub.

A few days later I was called in to do an interview with BBC Radio Wales. While I was there, one of the staffers handed me a note that was from my university. The BBC was passing on phone messages.

Rachel's and my parents shouldn't be too worried about our living so far away from home -- the BBC has apparently decided to serve as a surrogate parent. I expect to turn on the radio soon and hear this: "Tonight's top story, Chris Cope should be eating more vegetables..."

Chris Cope lives with his wife in Cardiff, Wales. His column appears every other Tuesday.