The City of Bath (1)

It was the end of a week that presented weather that was (1) disgusting (2) horrible (3) disastrous (4) .... (5) £$%@^!%*@. I would not really go into the details of why it was all that and more, but focus on the positives. The weather God, I am so thankful to him, condescended to shoo away the grey clouds and the wind and the rain; and allowed his bright colleague, the Sun God to show his face; but only just for the duration of the weekend and the bank holiday Monday. No complaints though - He had been timely in being nice. And that meant I had the elements working very well to enable me to take a westward trip to Bath, a UNESCO World Hertage City. And I took the train despite taking a pledge a few months back never to travel by train in the UK following a one-in-my-lifetime-yet incident that predates this blog.

Bath does not contain a single building that, to me at least, is awe inspiring as the Taj Mahal or the Brihadeeshwara temple; neither does it contain a single building as intriguing as Gaudi's Sagrada La Familia. But it is for no reason that the city, as a whole, has been elected a World Heritage Site; and UNESCO uses an more scientific mechanism to make these lists than that private body that asked everyone to vote for the Seven Wonders - even those who had been unfortunate enough not to have seen any of the nominees! The visit Bath website states that there are over 5000 'listed' historic buildings in this city - some number I say!

The first site we visited was the Roman Bath Complex, comprising a number of open baths, large and small and ruins of ancient temples. While the state of this complex speaks volumes about the maintenance efforts (which should definitely be well-funded by the non-trivial admission fee), I must express my disappointment at the non-aesthetic look of the facilities where one gets the opportunity to view ruins of the temple to Sulis Minerva, a hybrid God - the Celtic Sulis and the Roman Minerva. It is definitely amazing that over a million litres of water bubble (or is it bubbled, I can't remember) out of these springs every day; and these Romans, who, hopefully, should have looked like something out of today's fancy dress competitions, were smart enough (smarter that I can imagine myself to be) to build drainage systems to take out this large excess of bubbling out out into the river Avon.





(To be continued)