Graeme?  Bristol seems like a random city to plan for your first excursion.
Stay with me, there was a reason to the randomness. 

As I may have said previously one of the reasons I chose the UK as my exchange destination was the fact that I am actually a British citizen.  Which means I am entitled to work in Britain.  But to do so I needed a National Insurence number (the equivalent-ish to Canada's social insurance number.)  This involved quite the process starting with phoning the Office for Work and Pensions to set up my account and register for an interview.  This was all relatively beurocratic but straight forward until they told me that the closest Job Centre to Cardiff was either in a small Welsh town I can't remember the name of or Bristol.  Seeing as my grandma had grown up in Bristol along with my friend Jack I decided it'd be more fun to go out and explore a part of my heritage.  

Getting To Bristol (From Cardiff) :

By Bus - Around 8-12 pounds.  
By Train - Without a RailCard it's between 13-15 pounds.  With a RailCard it's about 8.  

I booked this trip before I really looked into the different traveling options, having ridden the coach before, so I didn't really consider the train.  Now that I have a R.C I definitely would prefer traveling by train.  It's faster and more convienent, for at least small trips like this.

It may be slight sacrilege for me to say this as I understand all British cities are slightly competitive but Bristol, at least in layout, is very similar to Cardiff.  The downtown core is centralized to a main shopping area with the university about a twenty minute walk up a small hill.  The downtown has two main shopping plaza's separated by a outdoor, pedestrian only, promenade.  
Yet there are some fairly major differences.  Firstly the buildings in Bristol are noticeably taller.  In Cardiff the tallest building (and there really is only one) is around ten or fifteen storeys tall.  In Bristol the city core has significantly more high-rises and to me feels way more like a large city.  (Or what I've come to picture as a city living in Vancouver.)  
The University of Bristol campus is gorgeous.  From the buildings I saw they've reworked old cathedrals and middle / gothic age looking structures into lecture halls and classrooms giving everything a very Hogwarts-esc feel.  

In the later part of my day out it started to rain fairly hard so I gave up my city exploring in favour of warming up in a local cafe.  There was a it of a mix up in my return journey that I think is worth mentioning.  To those of you who are unfamiliar with taking greyhounds / coaches sometimes (as I found out) the journey which you are taking is only a small leg of a bigger itinerary.  What I mean is that, for example, I was going from Bristol to Cardiff but that trip was encapsulated into a bigger trip).  So, this essentially meant that when I got to the coach station instead of looking for the bus that was going from London to Swansea I was trying to find the coach going from Bristol to Cardiff, not knowing that the aforementioned bus was there waiting for me.  To my benefit nowhere on the ticket or on the departures board did it mention that my trip was only a leg of a larger journey.  Plus I had the added stress of my phone being at like 15% and having no way to charge it.  

In the end I called National Express asking them where my coach was and when they found out I missed it they booked me onto a later bus.  It was complicated and by that point in the evening I just wanted to be back in my room but that's the reality of traveling.  Sometimes things don't go exactly the way you planned them and you just have to be flexible and roll with the punches.

G- 

PS I made a Vlog over on my Youtube channel about Bristol.  
Check it out here : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfMqjeaY654