Bath

On Sunday afternoon, I went on a quick trip to Bath with Cohen and Juli.

Juli drove me and Cohen to Bath for an afternoon excursion. The drive was approximately 2 hours and took us through the countryside.

Bath looks like a bigger version of Oxford's Beaumont Street. We had started walking and stopped for some coffee/ice cream, and it turned out we were in a shop on Bath's famous bridge, Pulteney Bridge.

The parks looked beautiful, but we didn't have time to visit them.

Juli had already been to the Roman baths, and Cohen wanted to hang out in a cafe, so i went to the baths on my own.

You start at the top level before going through a museum which leads you to the baths.

The baths here were a religious experience. Bath was originally called Aquae Sulis by the Romans in the first century. The goddess of the bath was named Aquis Minerva.  People often gave offerings to the goddess by throwing things into the baths. The most common items were pieces of metal with complaints about wrong-doings, and if you had ideas about who caused these wrong-doings, you could give a list to the gods to help them out in the punishments.

an alter

In the sauna room, you could see the rocks that held up the floor. A fire would warm the air under the floor, and pipes went along the walls to fill the room with heat.

There was one room next to the main bath that was full of ruins; it was dark and smelled like stagnant water.

The main baths are currently green because the sun leads to the growth of algae. You could actually see the algae bubbling from the hot springs. During ancient times, the baths would have looked much nicer since they were covered by a roof. People from all socioeconomic clases came to use the bathes. The poor would scrape dirt off their bodies beforehand, while the rich had slaves to do this.

People would visit the baths for an entire afternoon. Clothes were not worn throughout the bathing complex, but bathers wore wooden sandals in the heated rooms.

The steps for bathing are:
1) Undress and leave your clothes with a slave
2) Enter a warm room to acclimatise to heat
3) Move to a hotter room with tubs of water
4) Go to the sauna
5) Have a slave oil, massage, and scrape you
6) Go to the above rooms in reverse order, then go into a cold bath.

After seeing the baths, I tried bath water. It wasn't particularly good.

After I visited the baths, we walked up to the Circus, a circular street lined with curved townhouses and a little park in the middle.

The Royal Cresecent, a big curved row of townhouses with a big grassy area in front of it, was down the street from the Circus. Bath is full of green spaces.

Bath was also incredibly hilly.

We picked up some food for dinner to eat in the car. We had some problems navigating all the roundabouts on the way home. You could barely travel more than 15 minutes without having to enter the roundabouts, which are confusing traffic circles.