Beautiful Bath and Oxford

I have definitely been crazy busy since the last time I posted! I have learned the hard way that, despite what I might want to believe, sleep is actually necessary. Which is highly unfortunate, because there is so much to do and see!

I think I ended my last post with what we did on Tuesday. The next day, Wednesday, I went to Shakespeare in the Park, and we saw A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I had actually never seen or read this particular Shakespeare play before, but I absolutely loved it! It was hilarious! We basically just sat on the grass and brought a picnic, and then the actors just kind of walked around. There wasn’t an actual stage, so they usually were in the front but occasionally they would walk around among all the people watching. It was so much fun!

Nicole, Me, Raychel, and Madi at Shakespeare in the park!

On Thursday I went out to the labs again for a safety induction. It was pretty straightforward, but I loved how they kept calling it a la-BOR-a-tory instead of a LAB-or-a-tory. : ) And people say Renaissance differently here too. They say it like Re-NAI-ssance. Maybe England has a thing with putting emphasis on the second syllable or something.

Oh, I almost forgot. Last week the weather was AWFUL. The temperature was only in the 80s, but the humidity made it so much worse. I had no idea that Britain was humid. The worst part though is that nobody has air conditioning! Our apartment rooms don’t have air conditioning, the Union Society where we meet for class has no air conditioning, none of the shops have air conditioning, nowhere has air conditioning! This makes it particularly miserable, because in Arizona, it may be hot, but you can always just go inside. Here, it is hot and humid outside, but you can’t even go inside to cool off! Classes were miserable, and my bedroom felt like a sauna. I couldn’t even open the windows because for some reason there is now a bee problem outside my window, so if I open the windows, bees will fly in. I would rather be super hot than stung by bees, so yeah.

On Saturday I went to Bath with my friends Nicole and Taylor. We got up at 5:00 am to walk to the train station and then catch a train to London, where we rode the tube to switch train stations and then hopped on a train to go to Bath. As soon as we got to Bath, we had to run to get on the bus tour to Stonehenge because our train was half an hour late since apparently a freight train had broken down on the tracks and blocked everything. We took the tour bus to Stonehenge, where we had to take another bus from the museum to the actual Stonehenge site (so many buses and trains, ugh), and it was pouring rain the entire time we were on the buses. Fortunately though, it stopped when we got to the actual place! Yay!

Taylor, Nicole, and me and Stonehenge

 As part of the tour we got these weird little audiotour things where we could press certain numbers at certain stations to hear more about Stonehenge. Basically it just told us a bunch of theories about why Stonehenge was built and when it was built and who built it. Apparently work on Stonehenge started around 3000 BC when people dug a large circular ditch with a bank on each side and then dug 56 holes inside. The banks were created using the chalk that was dug up from the ditch, so they evidently used to be white. The holes held pillars and cremated remains of people, and today they are called Aubrey Holes. Apparently they used antlers to make tools to dig this stuff.  They had tons of antler tools on display in the museum.

Listening to an audiotour.

 We also saw lots of burial mounds in the distance. There are dozens of these burial mounds—called “barrows”—all around the site, but they are pretty far off in the distance.

You can sort of see the burial mounds way off in the distance behind the fields but before the trees.

 Something I didn’t know before was that Stonehenge was actually built over a really long period of time, and the stones were actually rearranged several times. The big stones that we see today are called sarsen stones, and they are a type of sandstone. They were constructed around 2500 BC in a big outer circle and then in a smaller interior horseshoe. The stones that lie across the tops of the upright ones are called lintels, and originally the outer circle had lintels connecting all of the upright stones while the U-shape inside was made of five trilithons, which are two upright stones connected by one lintel. Each sarsen stone weighs about 25 tons and was dragged to the site from about 20 miles away. There are also circles of smaller stones called bluestones, and each bluestone weighs from 2-5 tons each. These, however, were brought all the way from Wales, about 150 miles away! Nobody knows how the Neolithic people transported these stones. Around this same time but after the sarsen stones were put up, the Avenue was created to lead from Stonehenge to the river Avon. The Avenue is just two really long parallel ditches with mounds that are placed side by side.

This is apparently what Stonehenge is supposed to look like.

Clearly it is falling apart a little bit.

A different side of Stonehenge. . . .

A bit closer up : ) You can't actually walk up to them, but this was actually kind of nice because now there aren't millions of tourists in your pictures. If you really, really, really want to walk in the circle, there is a lengthy application process you can go through to be approved to walk up to the stones.

There are some other random stones scattered throughout the site. One is called the Heel Stone, and it is unusual because it hasn’t been shaped like the other stones at Stonehenge, leading people to believe it might have just naturally been there. But apparently it does line up with the summer solstice, so there’s that. Another stone is the Slaughter Stone, which—contrary to what the name suggests—was not used for sacrifices. It is evidently just a sarsen stone that fell over. Lame.

The Heel Stone

Stonehenge with the Slaughter Stone off slightly to the left

One theory is that Stonehenge was considered some holy place where you could come to get healed. Archaeologists/historians speculate about this because of the large amount of people buried nearby who have broken limbs and such, but we figured, well duh, they had big sarsen stones falling on them! Of course they had broken limbs! Apparently there was quite a community built up near Stonehenge as it was being constructed. Several thousand people were involved in the construction process, and the museum has some replicas of Neolithic houses that you can go see.

Cool house replica

We took the tour bus back to Bath, where it was still pouring, leading us to make really pathetic jokes about how instead of being named “Bath,” Bath should have been named “Shower.” We were more than a little sleep-deprived. : P

Once we got back to Bath, we wandered around for a little bit and saw the bridge that Javert jumped off of in the Les Miserables movie. It was supposed to be a bridge in Paris, so they filmed it in Bath where the cool stuff is going on in the water (I have no idea why it looks like that, but it is definitely recognizable) and then added the Paris background in later.

The bridge! With the weird water thing. I don't know what's going on down there.

It finally stopped pouring in the afternoon, which was great. We went and saw the Circus and the Royal Crescent, both of which are prime examples of Georgian architecture. The Royal Crescent is shaped, like the name says, in a crescent, and the Circus is a circle of townhouses. If you stand in the center of the Circus, the doors of the houses face you. The Circus was designed by an architect named John Wood, but he died before it was finished. His son, also named John Wood and also an architect, finished the project and also built the Circus.

Me at the Circus!

More of the Circus

The Circus again

The Royal Crescent

The other side of the Royal Crescent

Me in front of the Royal Crescent!

 After admiring all the Georgian architecture, we went to the Jane Austen Museum. Jane Austen lived in Bath for about five years, and apparently she really hated it. Though some of her novels are set in Bath, the only characters that actually like Bath are the ones that the readers are supposed to hate. Jane Austen was from out in the country rather than a large city, and she didn’t like the vanity of lots of the people in Bath. She even was proposed to in Bath, and she accepted, but then the next morning she went back and declined.

Me at the Jane Austen Center

A drawing of Jane Austen by her sister. Apparently it was never finished because it looks nothing like her. So yeah. But we have no other actual portraits of her, so we have to go off of this.

We then went and saw the house that Jane Austen actually lived in. Now it is just a private residence, so we hurried up to the door and took pictures and then ran away. It looked like some sort of bridal shower was going on, based on the decorations we could see through the window. I can’t even imagine living in the house that Jane Austen lived in. They should put the museum there instead of the random house it is in now. Oh well.

Jane Austen's actual house!

After going to Jane Austen’s house, we went to the Fashion Museum. We only went here because we had a discount on a ticket that included both the Fashion Museum and the Roman Baths, so we figured, eh, why not. It made a lot of sense though, after going to the Jane Austen house. I didn’t realize that Bath was kind of a center for high society and fashion, but evidently it was. We got to see some one of the Assembly Halls where major social events used to take place, such as dances. Jane Austen went to many of these, even though her family was on the lower end of the upper class.

pretty chandeliers in the Assembly Room

In the Assembly Hall, we saw costumes that were worn in Downton Abbey as well as a special exhibit on different outfits worn during World War I. In the rest of the museum we saw an exhibit on Georgian fashion, mostly the crazy dresses that women wore. They were very elaborate, and the flowers stitched on the dresses are supposedly botanically accurate. However, fashion was very connected to Paris, and during the Napoleonic Wars, Bath was cut off from Paris, and French textiles and imports were outlawed. This led to the really plain and rather less colorful dresses that were worn during Jane Austen’s day. Clearly England wasn’t too good at coming up with their own fashion. One of the highlights though was being able to dress up in the big dresses with the hoop skirts and corsets! The corsets weren’t exactly historically accurate since they had Velcro and buckles and all, but the idea was the same. Now I understand why Victorian women were passing out all the time—they literally couldn’t breathe! Finally, there was a section on modern fashion, but we really couldn’t care less about that, so we walked through that really fast.

Maggie Smith's dress on Downton Abbey

A soldier's outfit from WWI

Early Georgian dresses

Ridiculous Georgian dresses. Seriously, why would you wear these?

More pretty Georgian dresses

. . . and we get to the ugly dresses that the British resort to wearing when they are cut off from Paris.

Me wearing a modern version of a corset. It was horrible and awful and I feel so bad for those poor women who had to wear these. Stupid societal expectations of unrealistically tiny waists.

Nicole and I in hoop skirts and Georgian dresses with bonnets!

Nicole and Taylor in Georgian attire. I had to get a picture of Taylor's top hat. That top hat is amazing.

Finally, we went to the most famous site in Bath: the Roman Baths. The whole reason there are bathing pools here is because of the hot water spring. Celts found this spring and couldn’t explain it, so they figured that it must be because of the gods. They built a shrine to their goddess Sulis, and when the Romans invaded around 70 AD, they equated Sulis with their goddess Minerva and built a temple on the site that they dedicated to Sulis Minerva (I guess they just combined the two goddesses into one?). The Roman name for the town was then Aquae Sulis, which means “the waters of Sulis.”

The Romans then built up around the spring and was able to conduct the water through lead pipes to create the baths nearby. There is one Great Bath, and then several other smaller ones nearby. The waters were supposed to have healing powers because it came from the sacred spring, but nearly everything in the baths was lined with lead, so I wondered whether or not bathing here was actually more harmful than helpful. The Romans who came here didn’t seem to notice that the lead hurt them though.

The Bath Abbey, which is right outside the Roman Baths.

You got great views of the Bath Abbey from inside the Roman Baths.

The Great Bath

Me at the Great Bath.

This was the pediment on the temple. The thing in the middle is a Gorgon (it's got snakes in its hair), but Gorgon's are supposed to be female, so it might be some combination of a Gorgon with a water god.

Sulis Minerva

The Sacred Spring! You can see the bubbles from the water coming up!

Me and the bubbles.

Bathing here was quite a process, and there were many different rooms for different things. There were undressing rooms, and then there was a series of rooms called the caldarium, tepidarium, and frigidarium. The tepidarium is a warm room, and people would go to this room so that they would slowly get used to the heat before going to the caldarium, the hottest room. Here they rubbed oil on themselves and then scraped it off after sweating a lot. The gross thing is that if the person was someone important or admired, like a famous gladiator or something, they would catch their sweat/oil in a bucket, and it was then sold to the local ladies so that they could rub it on their faces. They thought that rubbing that person’s sweat on their faces would give them the qualities of that person. But that is still one of the nastiest things I have ever heard of. Ick. Anyway, the caldarium had a ceramic floor supported by these weird stacks of flat square bricks, and some poor unfortunate slave would have the job of stoking a fire underneath the floor to heat the room. After the bathers’ pores were opened by the caldarium, they would go to the frigidarium, the coolest room, to cool off and close their pores. Then they would go bathe in the Great Bath. Apparently this bath was different from other Roman baths in other cities, because bathers were not separated into different baths based on their class or social status. Everyone bathed together here.

Taylor, Nicole, and I in front of the Great Bath

This shows where the different baths are and what the original Roman structure looked like. It also shows the flow of water.

The overflow where the extra water is drained from from the baths to the river.

Me in front of the bath again.

The baths! AGAIN!

This is the caldarium with the weird stacks that held up the ceramic floors.

The museum also had lots of artifacts from the spring. People used to throw coins in the spring, so there is a rather large collection of Roman coins covering a large time frame inside the museum. My favorites were the little “curses” on display: people would write down complaints (like their cloak was stolen or something) on little bits of lead, and then they would throw them in the spring in hopes that the goddess would help them find the culprit. There was even one written in British Celtic that people haven’t been able to read yet.

The curses written on lead : )

After winding through the baths and the museum, we were able to drink some of the water from the spring. I’m not sure how this was safe since practically everything there is coated with lead, but evidently tourists have been doing it for years and nobody has died yet. They did advise though that children under the age of seven not drink it. It was warm and really gross, and it definitely doesn’t have healing powers. Oh well.

Me and Nicole drinking the bath water. It was disgusting.

The spa water analysis! It doesn't look too bad, I guess.

After a quick stop at McDonalds for dinner—yes, the portion sizes are way smaller here! The mediums are smaller than the smalls in America—we took the train home and got in a little after midnight.

Just a random street in Bath.

I really liked this view of Bath from the train! Unfortunately, I had to take the picture through the train window, so you can kind of see my reflection in the glass.

 The next morning we got up bright and early though to go to Oxford! This trip was organized by the summer program, so we just got on a bus with everyone else. We got to Oxford and the Program Assistants took us on a brief walking tour of the city, and then we stopped at a park for a picnic lunch. This was when we started realizing that we might not be able to see sights nonstop every single day, because we were so exhausted. I didn’t really like Oxford as much as Cambridge, but obviously I’m a little bit biased. I felt like it was too big and part of it were too modernized, whereas Cambridge is a lot smaller, much more charming, and has a homier feel.

This is central Oxford. Meh.

Oxford is like Cambridge in that it has a bunch of different colleges, and for whatever reason we were able to get a tour of Keble College. It was actually established in 1970 in honor of a guy named John Keble, who was part of the Oxford Movement to bring more of Catholicism back into the Church of England. The buildings are made of brick and are traditionally thought to be the ugliest in Oxford, but I actually rather liked them. Apparently the college was so hated that a secret society was founded which required one brick from Keble college for membership. White bricks would get you a higher-status membership, and blue bricks would get you an even higher status. This was all done in the hopes that the college would eventually be dismantled. Clearly it didn’t work. We got to go inside the chapel, which was beautiful and had lots of stained glass windows.

Keble College! The chapel is the big building on the right.

A different view of the Keble College chapel.

inside the Keble College chapel

The stained glass windows were so vibrant and colorful.

After the Keble College, we were all given free time to wander around. A group of friends and I decided to go to all the colleges that were featured in scenes in the Harry Potter movies, but out of six different locations we had planned, we were able to see none of them. Zero. It was very upsetting. We first tried to go to the Bodleian Library, where its Divinity Hall was used as the Hospital Wing, but we couldn’t get in. We also tried to get into the Duke Humphries Library, which is used as the library in the Harry Potter movies, but apparently you need a guided tour to see it, and those all sold out early in the morning.

The Bodleian Library

More of the Bodleian Library

Outside the Bodleian Library,but this time a closer look!

The Radcliffe Camera by the Bodleian Library

Next we tried to go to New College, where the cloisters and gardens were used to film courtyard scenes in the fourth Harry Potter movie, but there was some event going on and the college was closed to visitors, even though this was all during normal visiting hours. At this point we were getting pretty tired of walking around and not being able to see anything. Now we finally understood what it was like to be forced to queue up with all the other tourists and wait for admittance to these colleges, because there are always really annoying lines of tourists trying to get into the colleges in Cambridge.

The bridge connecting the two buildings in the distance is called the Bridge of Sighs. New College is the building on the right of the bridge.

The last college we tried to get into was Christ Church College. The stairway leading up to the Great Hall was used in the Harry Potter movies when all the first years first arrive at Hogwarts, and the Great Hall itself was used as inspiration for the Great Hall in Hogwarts. A model based on this Great Hall was built at the Harry Potter studios to be used in the film. Unfortunately, we couldn’t get into this college either because—get this—the roof had caved in the day before. The roof caved in. Seriously? This building must have known we were coming or something. We talked to one of the porters there, and he sarcastically told us that we were welcome to go in if we didn’t mind getting hit with falling stone. We were all perfectly willing to do that, but he still wouldn’t let us in.

Christ Church College (only the outside, of course)

The sign that dashed my hopes and dreams.

Pretty gardens in the back of Christ Church College.

So yeah. Rather disappointing that we were there but unable to see anything, but oh well. We joked that now it must look like the Hogwarts at the end of the last book, after half the castle was destroyed. Christ Church College was actually the college that Lewis Carroll went to, and it was in the nearby parks where he walked and told the story of Alice in Wonderland to the little girl—Alice—who inspired the girl in the story. We also walked by a lamppost and a church containing a door that looks like the entrance to a wardrobe, both of which supposedly inspired C. S. Lewis while he wrote The Chronicles of Narnia.

Christ Church College gardens, where Lewis Carroll walked.

The lamppost that possibly inspired C. S. Lewis!

We also went to a pub called The Eagle and Child where J. R. R. Tolkein and C. S. Lewis met as they were writing their stories. They were part of a group that referred to themselves as the Inklings, and lots of little trinkets and memorabilia relating to their books were hung on the walls and placed throughout the rooms. It was a great little pub, and it was just incredible to be where these important fantasy writers used to come and discuss their ideas.

The Eagle & Child pub

The room we sat in with our sodas : ) Notice all the Lord of the Rings posters and maps on the walls, and the door says Narnia on it : )

One of the best quotes from Lord of the Rings, hanging in the pub.

A C. S. Lewis quote

Oh, I almost forgot that we also went to the Pitt Rivers Museum. It was a museum of archaeology and anthropology, so there were basically just tons of skeletons and animal models everywhere, which was cool. The building itself was spectacular too, and I loved the ceiling.

The Pitt Rivers Museum. The ceiling is awesome!

A T-rex skeleton in the Pitt Rivers Museum

One last thing about Oxford—there is the rivalry between Oxford and Cambridge, but there are also rivalries between all the colleges within those two schools, Oxford especially. There are three schools that claim to be the oldest college in Oxford, all because they each have a different definition of what counts as being “first.” Merton College claims it is oldest because it had its statutes (still not sure what those are) first; University College thinks it is the oldest because it was the first to be endowed; Balliol College was the first to have actual buildings though, so it claims that it was first. Apparently this is the basis of a rather vicious rivalry.

Anyway, we finally made it home, but even though it was really late at night, tons of people headed to the library so that we could do all the homework and reading and paper-writing that we hadn’t done because we were travelling all weekend. Yay for no sleep and a busy life of studying and travelling at Cambridge!