Wednesday

Continuing the catching up of previous days, let's move to Wednesday shall we? Wednesday morning, we went to Bath. There's a natural hot spring there, the only one in the UK in fact. When the Romans were in England in the 1st century AD, they decided to use this to their advantage. They built a big swimming pool thing and lined it with lead so it would be waterproof. There's actually a lot more there than just one swimming pool though. They had a series of baths that were at different temperatures and the people would start at the hottest and gradually work their way to the bottom, jumping into the cold one at the end if they so desired. The baths used to be in a grand building, but now they're pretty much open to the air which means they're full of algae that's grown in them and thus are not in use. I got to take an audio tour of the place. It was really cool. They had lots of artifacts to look at and puzzle over. It was fun to walk where the Romans had walked all those years ago. I loved the experience.

After the tour, I went to find some lunch. I decided to try a pasty. It had lamb and mint in it, a flavor that I don't know I've ever tried before. It's kind of hard to describe what a pasty is, so it'd probably be easiest for you to just google it and see. Next I walked around a bit looking for the Jane Austen museum. I ended up getting lost and asking some random person for directions. Once I was headed in the right direction, I ran into some people from my study abroad group. They told me the museum charges a fee to get in and didn't look that exciting (I found out later from people that actually did go in that it was a waste of money and merely a tourist trap). Anyhow, I ended up taking a walking tour of the city which was interesting. Most of the buildings appear to be built during the Georgian era. Very simple, proportional, little decoration, but built in interesting crescent shapes. The two biggest examples of this were the royal crescent and the circus (aka circle). They looked like they were probably very nice inside, but the outside was quite plain as mentioned previously. Very different from the Victorian stuff that has all sorts of decorations everywhere. But, I digress. The architecture is so fun to get into here. Makes me wish we had more back home.

When we got back to Bristol, I went to a musical. Sadly, it wasn't all that great. And that pretty much wraps up that day. The Roman baths may have been the most enjoyable thing for me that whole week.