Day Nineteen from Melissa - Bath

I woke up this morning and what did I see? 

Bath was looking through the window at me!

This was my view from my bed this morning. Fabulous, isn't it?  To think I'm here...

Breakfast consisted of what I'm learning to recognize as a proper English bewakfast. Eggs, sausage, bacon, tomatoes, some kind of bread, and pork and beans. 

That last surprised me the most. Also the bacon. 

See that meat on my plate?  That's bacon. It's more like ham or Canadian bacon, but there it is. 

So today we toured the Roman Baths. 

This is the Great Bath. It was the biggest of them all. 

As you can see here, the baths used to have a ceiling in Roman times. It's sketched in light green. The dark green is all the Roman ruins that remain. The black line shows the current building, built on the Roman foundations in the 1800's. I'm standing on that level. 

In the 1800's the bath ruins were discovered, and people tried to build it back the way they imagined it. The pillars, statues and open roof were added then. 

The pool however, and the flooring around it, are entirely original. The bath is still lined with the original lead tiles, meticulously crimped and sealed at the edges, and still completely water-tight. 

It's this way. You see, the Romans came to conquer England, and they missed their home. Finding miraculous hot springs, they settled down to build a religious complex around the water, based on its healing properties. This is a model of what it may have looked like. 

They ended up worshiping a sort of composite god named Minerva Soulis. She was a combination of the Roman Minerva and the local Celtic diety Soulis. 

At one point, this complex was one of the most prestigious Roman areas outside Italy. Some of the pieces (that little round cupola in the model) are the only examples ever found outside Rome. 

This is apparently quite remarkable. Nobody is quite sure who the mustached man is, and why he's carved on Minerva Soulis' temple. Some people think he's the Gorgon, others think he's a Celtic water god. It's a very detailed carving though, all the way down to the snakes crawling through his beard. 

These are some of the things from the museum. 

Coins from one of the largest Roman hoards ever found. 

Household gods. 

Curses. These are metal plates that people inscribed with their problems and the vengeance they hoped would come upon the problem-makers, and then chucked into the pool. 

The one below is the only known example of written British Celtic. It's untranslatable. 

Other stuff found in the pool. 

A piece of the old roof over the pool. 

Ancient jewelry and safety pins!  I read about Roman safety pins years and years ago in the encyclopedia. I never dreamed I'd get to see them!

This is the actual hot springs. The water gets piped through the whole system of baths and then runs off into the River Avon. You can't see in the picture, but there were little bubbles coming up in the middle. 

Up to this point I've only really shown pictures of the Great Bath in the middle. There were a whole series of baths though. 

This was the hot room. The floor actually rested on those pillars of tiles, and hot air and water circulated underneath to heat the room like a sauna. 

And this was the cold room, where people could come from the hot room and jump in. Brrrr!

So - the whole place was really neat and I loved the ruins!  We weren't allowed to touch the water, due to algae and bacteria and stuff, but they did have a fountain of water and paper cups and you could try some. 

It tasted like metal, and a little bit eggy. Mostly like metal. 

As a hot springs though, it had nothing on Yellowstone. If the ancient Romans had seen it, they would have thought they'd found Mount Olympus itself!

I'm being facetious, of course. 

After the baths, we split up. With three hours to splurge, we decided to explore. 

This was lunch. See those flat bread things along the top row,  Cornish pasties. Very hot, very good. 

Turns out the famous red British telephone booths weren't always red!  The color was originally thought too bright, and they were painted like this. This one has been preserved as a sort of outdoors museum piece. 

It was Saturday, so all the booths were out. 

Candy store. Way too posh, so we went here:

That's chunks of fudge, in case you can't tell. Very good!

And then, before we left, we had to have one more sample of Cornish ice cream. 

They put a dollop of soft serve on top of the regular ice cream. I had black current swirl. The chocolate thing is called a 'flake.'

It was a little bit hard to make it back to the bus with my bag of fudge and two crutches and a melting ice cream cone. I'm proud to say I didn't drop any of them. 

Home again, home again, jiggety jig.