Bath: when in England, do as the Romans

Bath is highly recommended. Showers are OK too. If you have functional eyes or a casual appreciation for history, you may want to go there. And you will probably find much to recommend. (Unless you're Jane Austen.) If you're a tourist, you'll find the city perfectly sized for a day-trip. If you stay for a couple days and make friends, you'll leave way too soon.

The city has lots of nice architecture that isn't anything like early colonial brick. 

Notable bits include an Abbey that has nothing to do with Abbey Road! 

Had I gone inside, I would've been a fan.

Bath also has the first semicircle in Britain!

The Royal Crescent, rumour has it, houses a Python.
By the size of the structure, it's a really big one.

But you don't go to bath to look at a crescent. You go to look at the bath. It wasn't recent, but maybe you've heard--the Romans were in England once upon a time. And when they were in England, they decided that the supply lines were getting too long to trek back to Rome for a daily bath. So they built amenities. 

Or at least they took a Celtic shrine site, and between year 60 and 370, built a temple and some baths. They left the tub.

Romans once bathed here. Possibly dyed green; certainly dead now.

 Actually the water wasn't green then. There was a big roof covering the whole thing, so that the Romans didn't have to stare at the 11th century abbey. Thanks to the roof, no algae grew in the bath, and bathing was more effective. Unfortunately, the pipes bringing in the water were made of lead. To make matters even healthier, this was a religious center as well as a spa. People with a chip on their shoulder came from all over to write petty curses in tiny sheets of lead--most commonly due to stolen swim trunks. The complainers then took the sheets and threw them into their enemies' bathwater to give them extra lead poisoning. Kidding. But they did throw the curses into the water, and sacrificed something. (If the lead curse sank, the gods heard them. If it floated, the laws of physics were obviously suspended, and someone turned into a cow.)

Cubist terra cotta warriors.

These columns used to hold up a floor, which was raised so that they could do something with the temperature. The Bath Rooms had names like frigidarium (cold bath) and caldarium (bubbling cauldron bath). Presumably the floor was not invisible then.

The really old bit pretty much cracked itself up, and the nice above ground strucure is Victorian, so you can't even stick an ankle in the water. In the museum you can see some old Roman things that have been archaeologed out of the ground. Like the Medusa.

Medusa needed a shave; Perseus obliged with a Sweeney Todd cut.

This mysterious face was discovered around the baths. It's called the Medusa because of the fashionable snakes-for-hair look. This seems bizarre to anyone familiar with Medusa, lady gorgon, who wasn't actually reputed to be a bearded lady or married to anyone closeted. This is pretty clearly a dude. But there are some other theories floating around. Something about Oceanus, a water god, or a Celtic sun god, or that time your uncle got drunk and tried to wear a Christmas wreath.

Enough about the bath of Bath. There is a city, too. And a very nice free walking tour that doesn't even want tips.

Walking tour talking point: soot.

 Fun fact: If you walk around the city of bath, you see a lot of very pretty pale stone buildings. But some eons ago when those chimneys (everywhere with the chimneys) were burning coal, there was a lot of air pollution. They hadn't invented cleaning in those days, so the city of bath used to be covered in soot and dirt. This house has been carefully left caked in dirt and soot to preserve the visual of a bygone era.

Inevitably, you'll get bored of all the pretty buildings and shops that are closed when you need them and streets teeming with American tourists. Escape on a nice river walk!

It's a nice controlled river. As you can see, the sky is more washed out than the banks. 

Not to be arch.

And don't forget Jane Austen. As I mentioned, Austen-tacious used to live here. She kind of hated her time in Bath. And by 'kind of', I mean, she agitated to move back to wherever it was that she grew up. Her parents said no--then her father died suddenly. They moved promptly back to wherever. Not that I'm suggesting anything untoward. I'm just saying that everyone ever told me to avoid the Austen museum. There is one, though. Might even be more informational than this blog post.

He Biltmore, and more, and more...

Technically, only 1% were protesting...

Flashback to last week: I failed to update anything because I was on vacation, exploring North and South Carolina. In the North we saw a monument to the One Percent of old. In the South, the streets were overrun with protesters.

Now, I'm going to go out on a limb and postulate that only members of the 99% are reading this blog. If you are in the top 1% and you're reading my blog for fun, you should probably consider becoming a patron of the arts. Artists with grants turn out work much faster.

But even if you are in the top 1%, you've got nothing on the old Robber barons. Namely Vanderbilt. This, The Biltmore, was his house:

Notice that the ants are actually people.

So we toured the Biltmore (located near Asheville, aka Beertown USA 2-3 years in a row). This tour was no small thing. In fact, the house is the largest private residence in the US. It's big. At 2,000,000 square feet, containing roughly 500 rooms, of which 43 are bathrooms (only one was visible on the tour). The banquet hall really should count as a multiple rooms, because it's seven stories high and could swallow certain presidential homes with room to spare.

Conservatory

This is the .00001%. Didn't see any protesters, though. But the house is so fancy that its influence spreads out into the places it touches in town. Even the neighboring McDonald's has vaulted ceilings and a grand piano. It was rumored to be Vanderbilt's favorite eating establishment. All in all it was enjoyable, and an insane display of wealth from another age. My biggest regret is that I didn't approach visiting the house with plans for a day of live-action clue.

They didn't have a waterfall, so they built one.

But further into the city, Asheville became more fun with its own unique flavor. It was full of hippies, headshops, beer, chocolate, and art galleries. The art galleries were fun, cocolate cookies delicious, and the Expresso Stout even lived up to the storeperson's claims of being "only the best thing ever." In one of the art places, I came very close to buying a tiny tophat, but I realized I need to make sure my fashion choices do not significantly overlap with Helena Bonham Carter.



Now back in the cold winter of Virginia, and frozen hands. Hobo gloves are going to be a fashion staple this month for NaNoWriMo.

But their boat house was pretty much just a waterfront gazebo.
Poor Vanderbilt, didn't even have the money to put in windows!