Showers in Bath

Heading in!

I suppose that it's fitting to get wet when going to a bathhouse...
    So yeah, this morning we took the train to Bath, England, to explore the roman ruins and see the town. It's a really lovely town... there just is not very much cover for when it starts pouring rain. So our exploring got cut a bit short, and we got a bit wet.
   But the Roman Baths are really cool. They're really well preserved considering their age, and that the baths are in the absolute center of town. The museum is well set-up, too. They've build over the old baths, so you're guided along over the drainage channels, around the alter blocks and old columns, and past carved statues and found artifacts. The springs formed the center of a temple to Minerva (Athena), and were a place to communicate with the goddess and find physical and spiritual healing. There is a lot of anthropological history, too... people used to carve wishes into thin rolls of lead and throw them into the spring to ask Minerva to grant what they wanted. Apparently, most of the wishes were curses... apparently the Romans were friendly people. It was also really cool to see how advanced the romans were in terms of their architecture and engineering. They built a pretty impressive system to move the hot spring water around the baths and the temple, so the baths always had fresh water. And most of those systems are still working. So it was really impressive to walk around in buildings that people have been visiting for thousands of years.

   Today was also our last day in Cardiff; we're heading back to London tomorrow in order to catch our flight back home on Tuesday. It's be absolutely fantastic here. It's been fun hanging out with Scotty, exploring castles, seeing the Olympics... It's been quite the memorable trip!

Looking down on the spring. It used to be enclosed and was the heart of the temple.

These hot springs are the only hydrothermal springs in Britain.

Stone carvings from the original temple front. The ruins are amazingly preserved.

While we tend to think of Roman architecture as plain white marble, that's just because the paint covering everything has worn away. But we saw some very colorful floor mosaics, which were really neat!

I think we're in front of some cool ruins? Probably, because there were lots of cool ruins.

oof. wet.

Looking at the ruins...

We're in front of the main drain, but the flash was tricky...

The main drain from the baths. It's quite the testament to roman engineering!

The main pool.

It would have been so nice to soak in the pools... the steam was rising very invitingly, except for the algae that turns the pools green. Apparently the pools used to covered, so the water would have been clear because nothing would have been growing.

These tiles supported the floor and allowed warm air to circulate underneath, heating the room and turning it into a sauna.