Bath II: The Jane Austen Centre & the Streets of Bath

As any good reader (OK, any good female reader) will tell you, Jane Austen was heavily influenced by the time she and her family spent in Bath. While she didn't care for the town's society, her mother and father insisted upon spending time there to find their notorious spinster daughters suitable husbands. As we know, it didn't really work out. Jane remained unmarried until the time of her death in 1817 from Addison's disease.



Bath is home to both The Jane Austen Centre and the annual Jane Austen Festival. The Centre is quite small, focusing more on period replicas of clothing featured on the BBC and teaching the history of Austen's literary career than collecting memorabilia. But really, they have an excellent programme for a reasonable price (students pay £4.95) and a great gift shop. It took all of my will-power not to buy every fancy hat and pretty comb on display. (My self-sacrificing nature gave out later that day in a jewelry store, and I got myself an absolutely gorgeous new necklace.) They also have a Regency Tea Room, which we opted not to try, but it looked like it might be worth a second trip if we ever go to Bath again. The dress in that picture is a reassembled piece made from raspberry and crème striped silk discovered in a 19th Century dress shop.





1) Standing next to a mannequin wearing Fanny Price's wedding dress.

2) Much more exciting - standing on The Centre's steps with a gentleman who looked remarkably like Timothy Spall.


We also spent a large portion of our afternoon walking around and taking pictures of Bath's exquisite scenery. The town has a number of exciting statues, fountains, parks, and bridges.

1) A statue of *something* outside the Bath Abbey. My best guess is that He's Jesus throwing off His wrappings and exiting the tomb, but it looks like a drag-queen mummy doing a fashion shoot to me.

2) The fountain and park in the town centre. I'm not sure what this fountain is dedicated to, but directly behind it is one of the most beautiful parks we've seen since arriving in England.





3) A spire for something, possibly another church. I just thought it looked pretty. This street, with all of its grey buildings and pedestrians, is fairly typical of the ones we saw.

4) The river Avon flowing through an arched bridge and down a series of steps. We saw a man with a small boat fishing just a little further down stream.



And now for a bought of the "just plain weird..." Bath is full of street performers and troubadours, but these two acts took first and second place respectively.

These are two middle-aged men in gym-sock-padded thongs.













This is a middle-aged man in a gym-sock-padded thong doing a hand stand.













This is a middle-aged man wearing a gym-sock-padded thong doing a hand stand with a sparkler up his butt.

Yes, you read that right.

Middle-aged man.
Thong.
Hand stand.
Sparkler up his butt.

Zoom in if you don't believe me.



This guy was playing a violin with his hands and a guitar with his feet! Not as cool as shoving a sparkler up your half-exposed ass, but still pretty sweet. Can you even imagine the coordination needed?






And, just because I think it's cute in a semi-fetal meets Harry Potter kind of way, this is Chad's sugar mouse. We found them in one of the candy stores we visited!

Bath I: Bath Abbey & the Roman Baths

The BCA took us on another excursion this weekend, this time to lovely Bath. The weather cooperated without a fuss, and our early-autumn afternoon felt more like a lazy, August day. We were given a quick walk-around of the abbey by our study abroad director, Sandy, and instructed to stick together until our mid-morning tea started. Naturally, we all spread out and started taking photos of this great Gothic structure. According to a barrage of web pages and the abbey's official website, the building started as a monastery in the 7th century, was nearly destroyed in the time of William the Conqueror, rebuilt in the 1100s, and again in the 1500s after Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries (and melted down the bells and lead tiles on the roof for scrap-metal). If there are any anachronisms in there, please correct me. This is kind of a mish-mash of information and suppositions.


The front of the church features (as far as I can tell) the 12 kings of Israel, St. Peter, Jesus, and a multitude of angels. The bits on the side might be Jacob's Ladder, but I really wasn't 100% sure on that one. It's one of those lovely, symmetrical designs with flying buttresses, spires, and arching stain-glass windows surrounded by eroding carvings. All in all, a rather imposing structure. I opted not to tour the abbey, but we were in town when they rang the bells for something or another, and they sounded great. I was surprised to learn that the abbey has 10 bells - that seems like quite a lot, doesn't it? I mean, Notre Dame only has 5 or 6, right? Then again, the bells in Bath don't have cool names like "Emmanuel" and "Petite Marie," so I guess we'll call it a draw.




The Roman baths felt a bit anti-climactic. We were clearly in a Roman structure, but with all of the 19th century arches and artifacts removed it felt a bit redundant. The baths themselves were great - we broke the rules and stuck our toes in the water; they weren't kidding about the spring being hot! But most of the tubs were drained, the steam baths looked like holes in the floor, and all that remained of the mosaics were their supporting brick pillars. They elevated the floors about 2 feet with a series of stacked tiles so that the heat from the furnace could circulate under it and warm the rooms. Clever, those Romans.


I think my favourite must have been the plunging pool; whatever they did to light it really works in its favor. In ancient times, they filled it with cold ground water and the braver folks in the steam baths jumped in and out quickly if they felt like getting a great big bitch-slap from reality. The Romans tossed coins into the plunging pool, or so they say on the sign next to it. Personally, I think it may have been a ploy to get tourists to treat it like a wishing well. Hold on a minute, I bought a book about the artifacts found at the site - I'll check and clarify. Incorrect. The Romans dropped offerings into the sacred spring opposite the plunging pool, but I guess I forgive the World Heritage Organization this time. It wouldn't really be appropriate for tourists to toss coins into the Roman's sacred shrine. As it was, they would barely let us see it.


We had to stand on a metal rail and lean out two small, semi-circular windows to get a good look at it. During the Roman occupation, the room was almost entirely sealed off except for a few small windows and a single door. Three columns supporting a pair of marble beams created the illusion of a temple front when patrons looked in from the windows (probably the same ones we were looking through, in retrospect) and two statues of the bath's patron goddess, Sulis Minerva, stood on either side of the pool. Worshipers seeking healing, blessings, or trying to curse someone would look into the dark, steam filled room (its walls most likely covered in flora), get the impression that the Goddess was walking around on the water, and toss in jewelry, coins, and pieces of lead inscribed with their desired curses.

OK, there's no point in hiding it: my Archaeology of Roman Britain class basically wrote that last paragraph for me. But it's all true (I think)!

London V: Loose Ends

And, as always, I need my post of random happenstance and "just cool stuff" to finish off the review of this weekend. We stayed at the Royal Scot Travelodge on King's Cross Road, only about a 10 minute walk from the St. Pancras tube station, and while it was a little more expensive than a hostel (£40 each for 2 nights), we felt a lot more secure with our own triple room, toilet, and towels. If you need a cheap place to stay in district 1, remember to check its prices.

I tried mince and onion pie at a pub called The Stage Door, located opposite Victoria Station and down the alley by The Duke of York's. It was one of the few cheap places we found to eat, and had a very traditional pub menu. Now then, who remembers the notorious Cornish pasty? Mince and onion pie is a lot like that, except that it's easier to eat the crust off and leave the filling than a pasty. I basically got a plate full of gravy, which I'm slowly learning to exclude from my orders (even the one's you wouldn't think came with gravy in the first place.) So, here I've got meat and gravy, pastry and gravy, veg and gravy, and chips and gravy. Plus ketchup. Lots and lots of ketchup. Anyways, if you want a good pub in London (and especially if you're travelling by bus) check out The Stage Door. It's absolutely worth the visit.

We also ate at a Planet Hollywood after a very long, drawn out debate over the cheapest sit-down food in London. Unfortunately, we were in the middle of Piccadilly Circus, so all of them were around £12 per plate. Ultimately, we decided we felt more hungry than thrifty, so we went in to fulfill our American food cravings. And then I saw it, hanging from the wall like just another movie prop: Indiana Jone's whip, put on auction just a few months ago. They had the Holy Grail from Last Crusade as well, but my photos of it didn't turn out very well. I don't care how touristy or stupid it is, this made my night.

And, of course, no trip to London is complete without the obligatory pictures of the tube. I've been on the tube more than enough for one life time, but the dummy guard caught my attention all the same. I thought it was a really cute joke, and tried to take the picture about 5 times before getting the right setting. My new camera and I are getting along marvelously, by the way. It does its "smart" thing, and I point it at whatever I want. Once in a while I have to go to the scenes menu and tell it what I'm photographing - there's a setting for snow, a setting for panoramas, a setting for sports... a setting for everything, really - but then it usually comes out great!

London IV: The Victoria & Albert Museum

We finished our Sunday museum run with a visit to The Victoria and Albert Museum. Given my past experiences in London's museums, I'd say the V&A and The British Museum are the two best collections in town. At first I wasn't expecting much more than a steampunk funeral pyre since I'd always heard the V&A was full of old gadgets and failed inventions (don't get me wrong, I was really excited about it), but it's really a very well-rounded museum. We didn't have nearly enough time to do it justice, but since photography was allowed I went a bit camera crazy.






1) A sneak-peak of the V&A's Reformation and Renaissance display that they've got categorized as "under construction." And yes, that is a full-size cast of The David, thank you for asking.

2) A statue of St. George slaying the dragon.








3) A blown glass decoration over the museum's main lobby.


4) A giant column we found in the medieval room, most likely from somewhere on the Mediterranean if I remember the signage and symbolism correctly. This thing is easily 3 stories tall.