Bumbling About Bath

Okay, the rumors are true. Bath is indeed super-adorable, beautiful, and fun. I like it here. But let's rewind...

I got here on the bus at about 1pm on Sunday and went straight to my hostel, which is a pretty nice place for a YMCA hostel. In my dorm room, I met up with another American girl traveling on her own named Nicole, and we decided to explore together. We took a two-hour walking tour around the city (it is very beige, yet somehow it works), got some dinner from the grocery store, and lounged in the sun by the river. We returned to the hostel in time to watch a rerun of the Doctor Who finale with two adorable little British children and then the premiere of Top Gear. (I really do talk about the same things over and over, don't I?) I spent the rest of the evening watching TV and chatting with a new acquaintance about the proper spelling of "color", the proper term for football/soccer, and the stupidity of American movies.

Nicole and I began the next morning with the Roman baths for which Bath is named and has been famous for centuries. The museum and baths were just delightful, with lots of information and preserved structures from the hot spring's long history of luxury and decadence. It's amazing to stand over the stones of a ruined temple and imagine the men and women of long ago who trod on the same spot, never dreaming that we'd be digging up and treasuring their ear scoops and hair pins to put on meticulous display. I opted not to swim in the spa or drink the water (too expensive/don't care), but by the time we got out of the baths, it was time for me to go meet my afternoon bus tour.

At the recommendation of RFS, I'd booked a Mad Max bus tour. I'd decided for a while that Stonehenge was too far out of the way and too expensive, so I would just skip it, but that didn't seem right once I got here. The bus tour whisked us to hopelessly adorable Lacock, a tiny village whose only claim to fame is the many movies (like Harry Potter and Pride and Prejudice) who use its quaint streets and flower-hung houses as sets. We also pulled over to look at some thatched-roof cottages (seriously, my brain was screaming "TROGDOOOOOOR!" the whole time) before we finally got to Stonehenge.

We finally parked at Stonehenge and were herded through the gate and a tunnel under the road, but after that, it didn't matter anymore, because directly before my feet, Stonehenge towered over the windswept field. The flocks of tourists in their gaudy plumage gawked at the stones in their silent and dignified decay, audioguides chattering in their ears. I got fed up with the long-winded audioguide quickly and ignored it from then on, although I did have a very nice conversation with a couple of the guides/guards standing on the path. I thought it was terrible that the hordes of tourists were ignoring the real people in favor of their boring, long-on-facts-short-on-humanity audioguides, and chatted with the rangers about Doctor Who, Bluehenge, and the aura of the stones.

Because although I can see how some people would be completely unimpressed and nonplussed by Stonehenge, I'm just the sort of person who loves that kind of thing. Perhaps it's because that everything in American is new (nothing really older than 250 years or so--not from our civilization, at least) and the general attitude seems to be that newer is better. That may be true with cell phones and laptops, but that all melts away when you place your fingers on the cool, smooth stone of a church that has stood for longer than your country has existed, and stood before a pile of stones that were, with great effort, coordination, motivation and purpose, brought to this place, in this alignment, for completely unknown reasons. It reminds me that the world is not only bigger than I am, but that time stretches far beyond me, into the hazy past and into the future. It astounds me to stand in the grass near Stonehenge and hear nothing but the wind flowing over the rolling hills, ancient and solemn, and wonder who before me has stood on that same spot. Many tourists before me, with many lives of their own; Victorians, come to chip off a piece of the stones to take home; farmers, construction workers, Doctor Who film crews...and back, further and further, to the Druids, and thousands of years before them, the initiators of Stonehenge, about whom we know very little. It blows my mind. I love that.

I could easily bring a blanket, a picnic, and some art supplies and spend hours at Stonehenge. As you walk around it, the stones touch and interact with each other, constantly playing with shapes and shadows. I ended up having to run to get back to the tour bus, and I was still five minutes late. I didn't want to leave.

We arrived back in Bath at about 5pm, so I returned to the hostel and had some dinner with Nicole. At 8, I left with another new friend, Jessica, to go on the Bizzare Bath walk, which came highly recommended by pretty much everybody. The crowd was enormous--100 people at least--and the show was quite good: basically a one-man stand-up comedy act using the streets of Bath, the assembled crowd, and passersby as fuel. Highlights included a magic trick with a lost ring and the miraculous escape of a toy bunny from being chained up, weighed down, tied in a bag and thrown in the river. If you're ever in Bath, don't miss it. I met Shannon and her mother randomly at the beginning of the walk, and afterwards we grabbed a bite to eat together before splitting up for some sleep. Because the next day was a big day--the reason I was in Bath to begin with. Yes, it was time for the epic Cardiff excursion! But more on that in another post...