Greetings from Bath! At this point in the post, I’m writing to you all this beautiful, historic city. The group and I traveled to Bath for a short weekend trip, which took several (4 hours) trains. Our stack of tickets felt like a deck of cards.
The city itself is quite gorgeous, especially with the white limestone buildings. The architecture dates back to the Georgian time period (there were many kings name George, hence the Georgian period). With layers and layers of history to go through, our professor highlighted the significant events/sites.
So… a brief history lecture on Bath. It was found in the first century by the Romans and they built a community here due to the findings of hot, natural spring water. The water is believed to be rain water from thousands of years ago that has been absorbed into the surface and is now rising deep underneath, leading to the warm temperature. The Romans built religious spas surrounding the water, which later turned into a place of socialization and bathing. When the Romans left Britain, the area was destroyed due to flooding and erosions. The area was not discovered again until the 1800s. ‘Doctors’ (individuals who claim to be one) would prescribe 2-3 hours in the water and require people to drink 6 liters of the spa water. People would come from all over to take a bath here because there was this belief that the water of magical and could rid of any disease. Due to this popular belief, the town grew outside its wall over the years, to what is now a city of 90,000 people. That’s a very, very short overview of the city, but that gives you an idea how old this city is and by the pictures below, it demonstrates the care and effort that it took to preserve this area of British history.
Something I found interesting was the Goddess of the place. The Romans had traditions of making sacrifices to the Gods and Goddesses and the Roman Baths were dedicated to the Goddess Sulis. It turns out that if you want someone punished, you would write a letter to Sulis describing the offense and the person. If you did not know the name of the person, list the suspects, and they would be punished. The crimes can range anywhere from theft to murder, and the punishments often times got creative.
After the Roman Baths, I decided to go the Fashion Museum and look past decades of dress for men and women. The details on the woman’s dresses were reduced as you went up in time. It wasn’t until the beginning half of the mid 1900s that jeans were made for women. That is shocking. Before that, you would only see various dresses for women. However, it was interesting that the clothing for women got more open and slightly more revealing as time went on. The style for men did not digress much from its originally jacket and dress pants.
Aside from the places we visited, I quite enjoyed the restaurant we went to. It was a local pub that served pies with mash potato and gravy. I got a dish called ‘Wild Shroom’, which included mushroom and asparagus with white sauce in a small little pie sitting on top of mash potato and a wine sauce. It was delicious. The evening was lively and we got to chat with some Brits. The couple was not locals, but they had lots to share about British culture, especially about politics. There are major political changes that has been and will be happening. Brexit, the referendum of the UK, has been the topic of the decade. The UK does not want to be apart of the EU anymore and their fate will be decided on October 31st. It was nice to hear his perspective on the situation. I have read some things about the issue, but its a different experience hearing it from someone who has lived here and have been affected by different policies.
That’s all for now. I do apologize for the late weekly post. The weekend was packed and a little hectic with travels and trying to get back in time for classes today. I also just wanted to wait until I could get the pictures on here to share. Highly recommend a trip to bath (possibly longer than 2 days). This is just a beautiful area of wander and get lost for a bit.
Nottingham Adventures 