day 16

Today is our trip to Stonehenge and Bath. As I’ve already been to Stonehenge, I was much more excited about going to Bath, which I have heard very nice things about. I had to get up quite early today to get on the tube and find out meeting place on Backer Street. For this trip my API friends were nowhere to be seen. Not one of them. I have no idea where they were, but they totally missed out on a very fun trip. Allison and Bryan we there, so I hung out with them for this excursion. We all got on the bus and we were off out of London to Stonehenge. I had a new guide Adrienne this time, and she was much less chatty on the microphone.



We made the drive to Stonehenge and when we got there I was surprised that I remembered them being much smaller. But those rocks are really huge. We walked around the stones while listening to the audio tour. It was pretty much the same as I remember it otherwise. All the crazy theories that everyone from Merlin to the Devil to aliens are the reason it’s there. The biggest mystery still is why is it there? No one knows, and our guide said we would never know, but as an anthropology major I have to think that someday we’ll find the answer.

I also learned while at Stonehenge that the druids have absolutely nothing to do with it. Druids are a Celtic-like religion that focuses on the powers of nature. From what we know about druids, we know that they never has a house of worship, they always did their ceremonies in woodland areas. We also know that the stones of Stonehenge predate the religion all together, so there is no way the druids built the circle or should have any claim to it. They may have used it along the way, but they certainly didn’t build it. I’m a follower of the idea that Stonehenge is a calendar. The fact that the “heel stone” lines up exactly with one of the arches on the summer solstice can’t be just a coincidence. Why they felt the need to drag those huge stones to that particular place is still a mystery to me, but I am confident one day we will know.

Once we got back on the bus Adrienne found me and gave me an envelope with 4 physical, hold in your hand tickets for Wicked. It was such a relief to finally have them. This means that we can walk right in without standing in line or dealing with the ticket office. Thank goodness!!

Then we made our way to Bath. Now that I’ve been there, I love the city of Bath and if I had to live anywhere in England, I think it would be there. All of the buildings are made out of the same golden yellow stone that comes from the Bath area, which makes it all look very charming and peaceful. Though they’re made from the same material, the buildings don’t all look the same. They all have different designs and special things that make each area look different, but they all work together as a whole. There is also a lot of history here. There are many periods where it is the most fashionable place to holiday, then it becomes a cesspit of dirt and vice. Then someone comes along and pretties it up again, and then it’s fashionable.



We walked around the town a bit and saw some of the more popular sights. We saw several house complexes that a famous man designed that were for the most fashionable people in Bath. I say fashionable a lot because it was said a lot on our tour. Most every house we saw has a charming back garden that has a secret back door that leads into the walkway we were taking to get down the hill. The nicer houses are very, very expensive, some as much as 23 million pounds each, but they have fantastic views of the city and they have the most room.



We went to the Assembly Rooms where Jane Austen was known to dance. This is where all the best people came to dance and to find a spouse. They said the chandeliers in this place are worth 10 million pounds if you added them up together. You can still get married in these very beautiful rooms, but you have to book it a year in advance and the smallest room is 500 pounds for half the day. You also have to use their caterers, but apparently they’re “brilliant”, according to the receptionist who is getting married there in the fall.

After that we had some time to eat, and it’s a good thing we had 2 hours this time, because lunch took forever! A word to anyone traveling in the UK: meals out will take 4 times longer than they should, so plan ahead. We really wanted burgers or at least something other than sandwiches, so we found a place that had burgers and went in. They didn’t have room for us, but we had already looked at the menu and gotten our mouths ready, so we decided to wait. When we finally got a table, they said the kitchen was delayed, but again we decided to wait because we really wanted those burgers. We waited 40 minutes for our food to come. I got the Americano, which was pepper jack cheese, bacon (which is more like ham here) and avocado with fries (they actually called them fries at his place). The burger tasted pretty good, so I guess it was worth the wait. We walked around a bit after lunch and saw that Bath has a lot of really good shopping. There’s another reason why I could live there.

After lunch we walked further down the hill and came to where to baths are. The Romans came here a really long time ago and saw that the Celts already there were using the natural hot springs to worship their goddess of healing and water. When the Romans conquered someplace, they didn’t just come storming in and demand the locals change their ways. They try to amalgamate the locals into Romans culture. So they saw that this goddess the Celts were worshiping there, Sulis, was similar to their goddess Minerva, the Roman version of the Greek goddess Athena (my favorite Greek goddess). So they built a temple and a bathhouse over the springs and unified the two goddesses under one name, Sulis Minerva, to try to win over the local Celts. It worked pretty well and things were going fine until the Romans pulled out, then the city was pretty much forgotten.



The baths were fascinating and beautiful. The water in the main bath has turned green because there’s no longer a ceiling and algae has grown in it. The other baths no longer hold any water, but they are still very interesting to look at. There were all kinds of different rooms that did different things. One of the processes people would go through is to exercise and get all sweaty, then dip into progressively hotter baths and get really hot and really sweaty, then get covered in oil, then have the oil scraped off, then jump in a cold pool to cool off. It sounds pretty gross, but apparently it felt really good. I walked all though the different areas that showed the artifacts they found around the baths and the different rooms and areas where things happened. It was very interesting and filled with Roman and Georgian history (The Georgian era is when England had 4 King Georges in a row, the third of which was the last king of America.) At the end of the tour you could taste some of the treated water from the springs. I was told it tasted pretty gross, but I tried it anyway. It tasted like warm, unfiltered well water, with a bunch of minerals and sulfur in it. I thought it was nasty, but it's supposed to have healing powers, so I guess I'm healed of anything that might have been wrong with me.



After the baths we got back on the bus and made the 2 and a half hour ride back to London.

The day was pretty much over after that.

British word of the day: bin bag = trash bag. One time the housekeeping people came in and asked if I wanted my bin bag changed. I thought she said did I want my beanbag changed. It took me a while to figure out what she was talking about.