Southwestern Tour; Part 1- Bath

Emily, Nicole, Me, and Lynne (in order left to right) in front of Bath Cathedral.

This is our first stop on our southwestern trip. We got our good old bus-driver back , Tony! And a nicer, more luxurious bus— way more leg room! We drove about 3 hours on Monday, October 10^th, and got to Bath at 11am, dropped our stuff (which, I am proud to say, I was able to consolidate everything into one backpack!) and hiked downhill from our youth hostel to the Holbourne museum. There is a great little exhibition there by Thomas Gainsburough, a famous English portrait and landscape artist. The show was lovely and I really enjoyed it. I feel

like I learned a lot from just looking at his compositions and brush strokes, etc. I think I want to use him as inspiration from some later paintings/art.

Bath is where Jane Austen lived for a time, and right outside the Holbourne museum is the house where she lived, #4 Sydney Place. We actually had plans to see another of her homes later in the week (a house she spent the majority of her life and her writing career in).

Lynne and me at the Roman baths

The whole city is built out of yellow sandstone, so it's quite pretty, seeing as all the buildings match, in a way. Some are dirty though, the stone blackened with soot and pollution; those are sorta gross to look at. But, overall, the whole is very pretty. It's fairly hilly here— the town is nestled in a sort of valley and sprawls onto the hills around it too. It reminds me of ski towns in the summer, a little bit, oho it looks. Except no pine trees or ski runs making slashing crisscrosses over the hillsides— just yellow stone houses, Romanesque colonnades and pillars bedecking their porches which peep out from the trees.

Roman Baths— we took a tour thru the Roman baths located in Bath. The city used to be a Roman outpost way back when, like 400 AD or something. It fell into disrepair and was buried though, over time. Then it was rediscovered in 1727 and unearthed. It was a really neat place— it has a hot spring that bubbles up from the beneath the earth- the only one in all of England. Interesting, that, because we have so many in the western US. It was also kinda funny because, when the people in the 1720s unearthed the place, they commissioned sculptors and artists to specifically redo a lot of the place, like put in fake Romanesque statues and carvings around some of the baths that were really worn down, though there are still some original carvings from the Romans.

The Fashion Museum— after the tour in the baths (and no, we didn't get to go in the baths; they even told us not to touch the water :P ), we went up (hill) to the Bath Fashion Museum. It's a museum entirely dedicated to fashion. And when I say fashion, I mean clothes— dating from the 1600s all the way to the latest scraps of cloth they call “clothing” that came off the runway this spring, in the 2011 Spring European fashion shows.

Me participating in the interactive exhibit :D

It was really fun— they had a wedding dress exhibit and an interactive exhibit (which was everyone's favorite) where we got to try on corsets and hoopskirts. We all bonded over that one— huffing and puffing to get the corsets round our ribcages.

After dawdling in that room for about half an hour, we finally dragged ourselves from the strangely attractive (strange because, really, if you think about it, we were starving our lungs of oxygen on purpose!) act of corseting ourselves and went to go explore the remainder of the museum. This being our second museum, with an audio-toured ruin exploration of two hours in between that, I feel justified in saying that at this point my attention and faculties were beginning to tire and wander.

We wondered 9physically :D ) upstairs to the Assembly rooms— rooms in Bath which feature in several Jane Austen books I believe— and sat for a little bit before we went to go meet up with John and Peter at the Royal Crescent.

The Royal Crescent

The Royal Crescent is a little col-de-sac type deal— except way cooler. The houses, tall and skinny, are all connected in the front facade so that it appears to be one big house in a half-moon curve. The only thing separating the houses are the picturesque pillars that flank the front doors.

This place is home to some celebrities, including Nicolas Cage, who ons one of the flats/houses. It also featured in the BBC movie, Persuasion, at the end of the movie as the main girl character, Anne Elliot, runs towards her love to try and get him back.

Well, we had a meeting there and talked for all of 5 minutes because the wind really picked up and we were out in the open and in the cold. So, we split up and went our separate ways— some off to dinner, others to the giant Sainsbury grocery store to get food for lunch the next day (I was w/ the latter group). After our trip to Sainsbury's, we made our way back into the city's heart, guided only by a print-out map. We were looking for a shop that supposedly sold really delicious buns0 but after a half hour of getting lost, backtracking and finally finding a nice man who gave us directions,w e got to the palce and discovered they had run out of buns hours before. Luckily, we had a back-up plan. The guy who gave us directions had also told us abut an Indian food place, family-owned, near-by. So, we went there— the food was great, probably the best Indian I've had yet— and they even gave us warm damp towels (real hand towels!) to wipe our hands on after we finished eating. Pricy, but really nice and delicious. Jamuna's, I think it was called.

By the time we finished, it was dark, so we made our way back to the Youth Hostel and that is the end of my stay in Bath. We really lived it up— we did a lot, maybe too much. Our professors always plan more for us to do than we have time for, but hey, I guess I can sleep when I'm dead, right?