(Not Taking a) Bath and a Walk Through a Park

(Written last night on the bus, photos added this morning because the bus had very slow internet and wouldn't let me!)

At the moment, I am on a bus with free Wifi on my way into London to see The Deathly HallowsPt. 2! In case I haven't had the chance to gush to you about it, I am seeing it in the London IMAX, in 3D, at midnight! I can't express how SO FREAKING EXCITED I am and I am sure I will wax poetic about it in a blog sometime over the weekend. I wrote one a few years ago after the Deathly Hallows (the book) was released, and it deserves just as good of a sendoff now. A better one, in fact!

But first let me tell you about my day today! I want to get this all down before I forget, because I am doing a lot of stuff this weekend, and I really want to do this justice.

Today, we went to Bath (about a 2 hour journey from Oxford) and ideally we were going to go look at all of the Jane Austen-related things, but in reality the group got split pretty early on into the tour my professor was giving and my group was really a lot more interested in going to see the ancient Roman baths. So we did!

(This is where the water came in - apparently it is going fast enough to fill a bathtub in 8 seconds! And the minerals in the water really did turn the stone bright orange!)

Bath was just so beautiful! The Georgian style of house was charming, and seeing the streets of Bath was definitely a huge help for me to visualize what it was like for Anne (from Persuasion) and Catherine (Northanger Abbey) to walk the streets in their novels. Bath, it was emphasized to us by our professors today, was apparently a place to See and Be Seen by people (capitals perhaps unnecessary, but I like it). People would stroll about for no other purpose but to slyly catch the gaze of a potential beau, or to show of their new dress, or to talk disdainfully about other peoples' carriages. (Or at least that's what they do in Austen!)

(The Abbey in Bath... and a clever photo.)

I thought that the See and Be Seen principle was particularly evident in the Circus, a massive circle of townhouses with a lovely patch of grass and trees providing shade from the "white heat of Bath".

(This is part of the Circus, which were three sets of buildings forming a circle around the center, with a little patch of grass.)

(The patch of grass... with two hundred year old trees. I think they're two hundred years old, that's the best I can guess from googling it!)

Before going to the city of Bath (which I definitely want to go back to sometime) we stopped off at Prior Park, which was less than fifteen minutes from the center of the city. It was a park which exemplified the English Garden, and we spent about an hour walking around it... and it was just splendid! The entire time we were walking down the pathways, I heard people saying things like, "Screw Texas - I'm moving here!" or, "Think we could just buy a tent and live here for the rest of the summer?" It was an extraordinary experience to be strolling through the hills.

(But boy do my legs feel it now! I'll be hobbling for the rest of the day!)

The English Garden apparently differs from a French or Italian one because instead of being geometrical, it was all about a natural feel - for features to blend into the natural landscape. It reminded me a lot of more modern landscaping that you see back home, except of course on a more grand scale!

What's coming next, you ask? A blog about Harry Potter and a blog about my trip to Canterbury tomorrow!