Bath-o-rama

Happy Easter all!

I have spent a good chunk of the last two weeks either in the library with my nose in one of about a hundred books stacked around me, or with my nose in my laptop trying to organize and write up my portfolio for which I have been looking at these hundreds and hundreds of books. Occasionally, I took breaks for drinks and general stupidity with friends, but other than that, it has been quite dull to be me. SPRING BREAK!! WOOO!!!

Yesterday, though, I took a break and went to Bath! My flatmate Danielle and I got up around 6am, using the fact that it is already light out then to fool ourselves into believing that it was a much more reasonable hour to be getting up - like, 2pm - and scurried off in the direction of Paddington Station.

Paddington Station is not, in fact, named after a Bear. It is the other way around.



We climbed aboard a train and off we were, whizzing through such great English cities as Reading and Swindon before finally coming to a rest in Bath Spa. Yay! Georgian architecture ahoy!

Bath is very, very pretty. They have to build everything in limestone, so the whole city matches. The whole city is also a protected historical site. The bureaucracy must be mind-bogglingly fantastic!

It was a good time to go. The day was warm, if a little damp, and there were flowers everywhere and the leaves are budding. Spring in its finest!



I had to take pictures of them all because I can't remember the last time it was Easter and looked like Easter is meant to look.

The most exciting part for me was the Jane Austen connection. Bath is home to the Jane Austen Centre since Jane lived in quite a few places around town and set a few of her novels there. I love Jane dearly, and was eager to see as much Jane-related things as possible. Danielle really didn't care at all, but she didn't have much choice in the matter.

Our first stop was the Jane Austen Centre, because I was just so giddy I couldn't wait!


I wanted to get a picture of the poor fellow all dressed up in front, but the silly people wouldn't move! That's the best I could do.

Inside we got a little talk about Jane, with lots of Colin Firth jokes. The gift shop also had some scary prints of Colin Firth as Darcy paintings. Even too scary for me. I didn't think it was possible for Mr. Darcy to give me the heebiejeebies, but apparently he can. I am not a true Austen-ite. :(

After our brief introduction to Jane's life, we were shown to the exhibition hall where we could look around at Regency costumes and things. But it was closing in on 11am, and there was a Jane Austen tour on the other end of town that I wanted us to go on, so we asked if we could come back later and bolted off to catch the tour.

It took us forever to find the silly place, and the tour had kind of already started when we got there. It was being led by an elderly gentleman of about 105, who probably wouldn't have noticed if we'd just joined without paying or not. He later didn't seem to notice that he'd lost half of us when he led us through a giant crowd of people and turned a corner without waiting for anyone to catch up. I love Jane, though, so for her I ran inside and quickly handed over my £3.50.

The tour was pretty good when I could hear what the man was saying. Bath is a very noisy city, with lots of street performers and traffic and people, and our tour guide, in addition to not particularly caring if we were present, also had lost all capacity in his lungs to speak up. The man could walk fast though! It combined highlights from novels, with information about Jane's life, and general history of the city. My Rick Steves book did not seem to have very high praise for any of the Jane Austen stuff, but what does he know!


We saw this, which got our librarian spirits up!


Here is a picture of the baths with the top of the Abbey peaking behind it.


Here is some pump room having something to do with Jane Austen. I couldn't hear, so I don't know. But it's surrounded by construction things because they are building new "baths" so that people can actually come to Bath to bathe again!


We headed up the river. Up there is Bridge St. which is one of two bridges in the world with stores up and down the length. I think. . .like I said, couldn't really hear.


More of the River Avon.


Bridge St. again.


Down Bridge St. towards the Holburne museum. The street in the distance was used in the film Vanity Fair.


I thought this picture was about the street and the view of the hill, but it's really about the old man.


Here is a terrible picture of a Georgian square called Queens Square.


On this square, Jane Austen lived here.


She also lived here, at 25 Gay St. She did not live at 40 Gay St., where the Jane Austen Centre is.


We went up this path, which you won't recognize as where Captain Wentworth and Anne Eliot from Persuasion got together.


At the end of this path was the Royal Crescent. People spend millions of pounds to live there. They contend that it is the first ever crescent built.




This is known as the Circus. From above it is a completely round circle of homes, apparently built in the exact dimensions of Stonehenge. Our tourguide said it's popular with Druids who every Summer Solstice dress up in robes and frolic among the trees there.

After all this, our tour ended back at the Jane Austen Centre. Since we'd skipped the exhibition before, we took some time to walk around looking at the costumes and learning how a young Regency lady spent her time in Bath. We poked around the gift shop again, but realized that mine is an obsession that can not be met with lacy parasols or packs of cards with Elizabeth Bennet's face on them or doilies. So my lone souvenir is a postcard portrait of Jane that is now on my wall.

It had now been hours of traveling and walking without consuming food, so off we went in search of grub. This proved quite difficult as Bath had suddenly exploded with tourists and everything was filled to the brim! However, we finally found a small cafe called Hardy's of Wessex and my literary heart was filled once again with joy. I ate a ploughman's lunch and we rested, and then went back into the cool, damp Bath air for a little taste of Roman history.


Here is the exterior of the front of the Roman baths. That doesn't look very Roman!

The museum was pretty good, although expensive even with our student discounts. There was lots of history and looking at old steps and things that archaeologists had uncovered.






The Roman baths.

Deeper inside it got ookier.


It was cool. You could feel the heat of the steam and the earth down underground, and see the steam coming off the water. It will be neat when they finish the new baths and people can use them again.

Afterwards, we poked around outside and did a little souvenir browsing. We looked at the outside of the big Abbey, but did not go inside because they wanted money and we are tired of paying money to look inside churches.


Here is the Abbey with the big queue of people we had to wait in to get inside to see the Baths.


Our day was nearing the end. We stopped for ice cream cones, because, what the heck? It's Easter weekend! Then we meandered around a bit in the direction of the train station.

We found the oldest house in Bath.



This street looked very Georgian and lovely.

That was pretty much the end for us then. We hopped over to the station and onto our train back into Paddington. Quite a fun, painless journey. One day was the perfect length!