We arrived in Bath Sunday lunchtime, and before we even left the train station we knew that we would love it! Bath is a beautiful scenic place, with the very English looking homes, a river through the middle and lots of cute little boutique shops.
We found our hostel and dropped our bags off in the pub that acts as reception, and then went out for a wander. The hostel was in a great location, right in the middle of everything, and as soon as we walked out the door we found ourselves in the middle of Bath.
First stop was an ‘award winning Cornish pasty’ shop, which we stopped at, not so much for the queue out the door, which surely indicated great pasties, but more for the free wi-fi advertised on the window! You do become quite dependent on the net when it is your main form of communication with home, and after a few days without it, we were both keen to reconnect with the world! So we had our Cornish pasties, which were, by the way, very nice, and sat in the warmth and went on the net for a little bit.
We then continued to meander up the main street of Bath and quickly came across the Roman Baths, the central tourist attraction of Bath and a prominent setting in Alice’s favourite Jane Austen books. We figured that there is no time like the present, so in we went for a look around the Baths. We had audio guides, but I admit that I tend to tune out of those things after the first few stops, and by the end tend to not even bother turning them on! I prefer to look…
The baths were very interesting though. There is one main outdoor bath, which was quite murky looking, but we were assured it was crystal clear in it’s hey day! The steam was rising off it and despite its murkiness, in the cold Bath air, it was very inviting. Nobody swims in these baths anymore though of course, in fact they do not like you to even touch the water. When we heard that the reason for this though was that the water is dirty, not because we, the people, are dirty, Ali and I snuck a feel, and it was lovely and warm. We walked all though the centre and saw tidbits of the remains of these baths and heard how people would come from far and wide to be ‘cured’ by these healing waters. At the end of the tour we were able to drink a glass of the bath water, and I tell you, it was not how you imagine such nutrient rich water to taste. It was warm and yucky.
By the time we finished at the Baths, we had worked up a bit of an appetite, so we decided to check out the local Waitrose, which is the English supermarket chain that Jo and Phil use. We got ourselves a few snacks for whilst in Bath, and also managed to find some of the yummy custard that Jo and Phil had had for with our chrissy pudding, and thoroughly enjoyed a little too much of that for afternoon tea!
We then checked into our hostel, which was just across the road. We claimed our beds etc, retrieved our bathers from the very bottom of our bags and headed off to the modern day baths, where people do get to get into the water! These baths are called ‘Thermae Bath Spa’ and are pretty pricey, but we went on Gran (Thanks Gran!) and it was well worth the money. A nice change to endless days of walking, this was a two hour ticket into 3 separate rooms of luxury. Up the very top is the roof top open air pool, which is naturally warm, in fact it actually needs to be cooled down. The water in these pools fell to the ground 15,000 to 20,000 years ago, and has taken this long on its journey to make it back to the Earths surface. When it does come to the surface, it is a toasty 50 degrees. It is cooled down to around 35 degrees for the bathers.
By the time we got up there it was dark, so we had a lovely view of the Bath lights, in particular the lit up abbey in the centre of Bath. The water was nice and warm, though Alice and I did think that they could have turned it up a few degrees. You have to stay really low in the water, because the air is icy! They had lots of noodles in the water and everyone was just floating around.
Downstairs, on the middle level, are the steam rooms. There is one big room with hot pressure showers in the middle, around the outside of the room there are big stones to sit on with foots spas built into them, and then within the room there are four smaller steam rooms, each with a different scent (lavender, mint etc). Alice was a bit apprehensive about this initially, but it was really nice, and so warm! Just getting from the rooftop pool down to the steam rooms was enough to make you pretty cool, so it was a lovely warm relief.
On the bottom level was the Minerva pool, which is a big warm pool that they call a whirlpool, but which just has light pressures that will float you around the pool if you let it. It was again very nice, but like the rooftop pool, very coupley! I’m sure Ali and I weren’t they only ones not there with our partners, but it sure felt like everyone was floating around in pairs, as one! There was also a section of this pool that bubbled up like a spa intermittently which was nice.
We did all three levels twice, finishing in the Minerva pool, and though we had initially thought that two hours would be heaps, we certainly didn’t want to get out at the end! A number of times over the next few days as we wandered around in the cold, we wished we could go back. The warmth was such a treat in the cold weather.
By the time we were showered and dressed afterwards, it was 7.30 pm and we were definitely ready for dinner. We found a nice looking place, I had English fish and chips, served with mushy peas (and that is how it was described on the menu!), which was yum, and Ali went for a burger.
Monday morning, after a yummy breakfast of cornflakes and vegemite toast, we went for a walk to look around Bath, and in particular to see the Circus and the Royal Crescent. These are two of the biggest of a number of circular buildings located in Bath, which are made up of many 5 storey apartments, but are designed to look like one palace. Very wealthy people live here, and in fact we found out later that Nicholas Cage recently bought one of the apartments in the Circus for around 4 million pounds.
It was a beautiful sunny morning, and we had heaps of fun strolling through parks, just as the Jane Austen characters did! There were lots of people out taking advantage of the sunshine, though it was still very cold and the grass white with frost.
Afterwards we headed back into central Bath to buy tickets to a Jane Austen walking tour. We did this, but around 15 minutes later they announced that the tour would not be running today. To make up for this, we instead visited the Pump Room, which is where the ladies of Jane Austen used to ‘stroll, arm in arm, discussing their confidences’! Today the Pump Room is a fancy tea house with a string quartet playing, so we had morning tea. Ali had apple juice, a bacon and tomato Bath roll and a pot of coffee. I had pear juice, buttered crumpets with jam and a hot chocolate, and we also sampled a Bath bun with cinnamon butter. All delicious and left us feeling very full!
Later in the afternoon we met a group for a free walking tour, which took us all over Bath and gave us a bit of a history. It turns out that a lot of Bath is made up of facades. The Georgians were a little superficial and liked things to look nice, but didn’t really care what was behind the façade. For example, some important guy did not like the view from where he sat to have his cup of coffee, so he had a castle built up on a hill in his line of sight. This castle can still be seen from Bath, but if you were to actually go to the castle, you would find that it consists of only the front wall! This same man also had a particularly attractive bridge over the river in his view. This bridge also still exists and is nice to look at. If you walk over and view the bridge from the other side though, it is decidedly more ugly!
The architectural style of the Georgians is all about symmetry, so you will see buildings with a very neat spread of windows. If you look closely at one building, you notice that there is a chimney directly above the central window. If you then look closely at the window, you will realise that you actually can’t see through it, as it is just there to look like a window, with a frame and glass over the wall. In actual fact, behind it is the chimney pipe! The ‘window’ is just there to maintain the Georgian style.
In the old days, they also had a window tax, meaning that the more windows you had in your house, the more money you had to pay. Hence a lot of buildings have bricked out windows, done to save some money. Some important person eventually abolished the window tax when he wanted to have a palace or something with lots of windows built, and it was going to cost him a ton of money in window taxes.
After our walking tour, it was getting dark, but we walked back to the hostel via the old homes of Jane Austen. Ali knocked on all of the doors, but Jane was not home unfortunately.
Tonight it was Thai for dinner, the answer to Alice’s prayers! We had spied a busy looking place at lunch time so planned to head there, but then just as we were leaving, a guy in our room said he had been there and had not been impressed! That put a skew in our plans, but in then end we ended up going there anyway, it was a public holiday so the choice was a bit limited. It was good food too. The wait was a little bit ridiculous, but in the end it was really nice and a warm place to hang out for a few hours!
Their were a few of us hanging out in the room later on that night, so we ended up having a bit of a games night, 2 aussies, a Canadian, an Israeli and a Korean. It was really fun! First we played Trivial Pursuit due to limited choice, and Ali and I laughed our way through it, while a few of the guys took it a bit seriously. The funniest part was, that in the end, do not ask me how, Ali ended up winning! We helped each other out a bit, and the rules were altered a little, but she won none the less! We managed to find some cards after that and headed upstairs for some card games, one of which I managed to win, again I have no idea how, as I really wasn’t paying attention. It was funny that by the end of the night ,we had all managed to win a game except the Canadian, the most competitive of us all!
The following morning it was raining, but Ali and I went a walk across the bridge to the other side of the river regardless, and did manage to find a few cute little shops along the way! We personally compared the bridge from each side, and it definitely is much nicer to look at from one particular side! We went and had a look in the Bath Abbey afterwards, which had some lovely stained glass in it and also an Australian Flag for some NSW founding guy who died in Bath. I thought that best part of the abbey though was its decorations on the outside. On either side of the main entrance, there is a ladder going right up to the top of the church, with angels ‘climbing up to heaven.’ Very cute.
We visited Sally Lun’s house, which is the oldest house in Bath, and now famous for the ‘Sally Lun Bun,’ which is just a big sweet bun that you have with butter and jam. It was a cute place with lots of stories and a narrow little staircase.
Our ticket to the Roman Baths also included a ticket to the Fashion Museum, so we headed up there for the afternoon. It was pretty cool, with lots of fashions on display, from way back in the days of the corset, right up until this current year. The best part of the museum was the room in which we actually got to try on a corset and the skirt thing which gives shape to the big puffy dresses. I think it was a bit if a modern day version as the corsets had plastic clips on them, and really wouldn’t go on that tight, but it was novelty and we got some good pics out of it!
Next stop for the afternoon was the Jane Austen. We were first given an introduction spiel all about Jane Austen’s background and her family. She had quite a few brothers and only one sister. Neither of the sisters married or had any children, though her sister did go and help her brother out when his wife died, leaving him with 11 littlies! She wrote her books from when she was quite young, but many were not published until after she died at the young age of 41. No one is really sure what the cause of her death was. Jane used to come here for holidays, and then after her father retired, they moved to Bath and she lived here for 5 years. She apparently did very little of her quality writing whilst living here though, as she did not like the restrictions of town life, missing her country home.
The museum had replicas of the types of clothes she would have worn, excerpts from letters she wrote to her sister, and their was one actual original letter on display allowing us to see her handwriting. Alice also purchased another of her books, ‘The Watsons’, which is one that she did write while living in Bath, though never finished.
