Taking the waters

Almost caught-up! Almost! Only one more to go!

...I keep telling myself that, anyway...

Anyway. Two day-trips, both of which were awesome! And both of which, alas, I have very few pictures, since my memory card was a raging b*tch on Friday and I was too busy gazing in awe on Sunday to take many photos. But that (as I said about the Globe) is what the Internet is for.

Friday was my trip to Bath with Kate. We took the train in on a drizzly day and went straight to the Roman baths. (Get a ticket there and you get free admission to the Pump-room!) You also get to see this:



This, my friends, is the main soaking area. A typical Roman bath - and yes, I mean typical, all classes of people used these baths - is a day-long affair. You leave your clothes and go into the tepidarium, a pool where it's just nice and warm. There you get relaxed, and you also get covered with a mixture of oil and sand. From there, you go into the caldarium, which is basically a sauna, and you just sit and sweat. The theory is that the dirt and impurities are sweated out, but trapped on top of your skin by the oil-and-sand concoction. Once you've sweated clean, you go back into the tepidarium and get the oil (and by extension, the dirt) scraped off you. THEN you get to go into that gorgeous main pool and just soak and relax and feel good about life. You can also use that time to do deals, talk politics, play politics - the essentials of life for a Roman. Extremely awesome. I wish we had more of them.

At the site, they explained how in fact, come the 1700s, no one knew the baths were THERE. They'd just been built up and up and finally built over, and when they were discovered it was (understandably) a HUGE deal. But because of that, and also because the baths themselves fell into disuse and disrepair, you can see the cut-away floors, and the bricks they piled up under the raised floors to carry heat.

Speaking of heat - the water flows out of the Sacred Spring at perfect bath temperature. Kate and I dipped our hands in when no one was looking and we were behind a column. It was wild. We also tasted the waters in the Pump-room (the officially approved, come-out-of-a-fountain-and-are-not-green waters. They taste like sparkling water that's gone flat. It was fantastic.

The Pump-room is now a restaurant. It's also enormous. Perfect for lots of dancing couples, with a balcony overhead for the musicians (who were playing when we came in!). We didn't make it to the Upper Rooms, but we saw pictures, and they look beautiful.

We DID make it to the Jane Austen Centre, of course. Very fun exhibit they have, complete with lots of beautiful Regency-era costumes, many of which they got from Austen movies. I liked that they were up-front about the fact that Jane Austen disliked Bath and barely wrote while she lived there. But at the same time, you can easily see where she got the impressions that turn up in Northanger Abbey and in Persuasion. I thought it was well done.

And then we wandered around! We went to the Circus and the Crescent, which are literally right around the corner from the Upper Rooms and the MOST fashionable apartments in Bath. This is quite obviously not my picture - for one thing, I don't take pictures this good, and for another, my name is not QT Luong - but this'll give you some idea of the amazingness of the Circus.



The Circus, aptly enough, is a full circle of apartments. The Crescent, therefore, is a half-circle. Kate and I both preferred the Crescent, because it has the most breathtaking view in the entire city. I can't find a picture of it - everyone seems to want pictures with the Crescent buildings, not the view FROM the Crescent buildings - but it was incredible. And I'm pretty sure Kate got a picture, so once she gets it on Facebook, I'll move it here.

On the train back, we read Northanger Abbey aloud, each taking a chapter at a time and doing parts (I read Isabella and John Thorpe, Henry Tilney, and Mr. Allen. Great fun). And on Saturday, I did absolutely nothing. I slept until noon. It was GLORIOUS.

Tomorrow: the British Museum! Tonight: Liz goes to sleep!