Bath, Bridges and a Fancy Dinner

My sister busied herself with finding a good Chinese restaurant for lunch. The iPhone suggested what was supposedly Bath’s oldest Chinese restaurant, The Peking. This place however turned out to be rather average, with pink tablecloth and greasy food. We had fried asparagus starters and curry smelling of medicinal herbs(bleh in short).

From there, we went to the Roman Bath Spa which is the main tourist attraction of Bath. This is a site of great archeological import. The Roman Bath Spa dates to 1st century A.D when the Romans first invaded Britain. The Spa in question is a temple to goddess Sulius Minerva, a town centre the cynosure of which is a large public bath. Entering the Roman Bath, we were all given handheld audio guides(Made in Israel. I checked) which explain every exhibit on demand. I’m a big fan of this country’s museum culture, seeing as how every tiny town and hamlet has a neat little museum of its own. It is given that they have the resources to indulge in such luxuries, but that belongs to another conversation.

One thing that made the Bath spa special is that some of the audio exhibits have commentaries by the travel writer Bill Bryson (Whose The Short History of Nearly Everything I’ve wanted to read forever). This was a neat way of making the exhibits insightful. Bryson in his commentaries quotes Charles Dickens, comments on how the bronze-gilt bust of Sulius Minerva evokes fear and how she isn’t the prettiest woman you’ve seen, and generally makes interesting observations that add some perspective to vanilla descriptions. The audio guides by themselves were very nicely executed. They were informative without boring you to death, like these things can so easily slip in to being. And there were separate audio commentaries for children where fictitious inhabitants of Roman Britannia explained exactly what each structure of the Baths were used for, etc.
I listened to the commentary meant for children. When nobody was looking, of course (Oh shut up. They were so much fun!).

One very old, wise sounding priest spoke of the animal sacrifices at the altar, while Bryson spoke of how the Romans were on one hand sophisticated and learned with their cleanliness, education and knowledge and yet primitive regarding animal sacrifices and goat-slaying astrologers.

The Roman Bath is essentially a ruin that was excavated and restored by archaeologists and scholars. They explain how the entrance to the temple has Luna, the moon god and the Roman sun god representing the union/balance of the opposites. The union of Male and Female. The site of the large Roman bath itself is a sight (Site is a sight. Today’s literary-gem forecast looks bleak). It is an open air area with grey stone pillars and a pool in the centre. The pool is a beautiful bluish green. Torches are lit all around to complete the historic setting. Most exotic.

Steaming hot water is pumped into the pool from one room and then drained off in another room. There are adjoining sauna rooms and a cold pond—now a wishing well. We got some nice pictures of the place, especially with the Bath abbey in the background.

The tour guide was a cheerful middle aged man who had a jolly witticism for every fact he presented. “The Romans consulted their astrologers just as I don’t leave home without consulting my wife each day.” he says to us tourists. The last time they cleared the wishing well, they found three credit cards he declared, to our amusement. I wonder what those people wished for. Hmm.

While we were advised to not drink from the baths as the water was not treated, we were lead to this very fancy café called The Pump Room where we were all given glasses of treated water from the Baths. Don’t ask me to describe the taste now. It was, well, water. The Bath Room, however, was one classy place. A place of chandeliers, pianos, scones, tea and polite conversation. Unfortunately, they’d taken their last orders by the time we reached.

From Bath we headed to Bristol which is only 10 miles away. Kaa maniacally insisted we go visit the Cliffton bridge, which threw up a good photo-op session-- One of the (many, many, many) sights I'll take back home. The magnificent bridge against dazzling lights of the city. We settled for an early dinner at an awesome Turkish restaurant called Bosphorous  where the sweetest waitress brought us good Argentinian Shiraz wine. For starters we ate rolls of deep-fried cheese and spinach which tasted heavenly with Hummus and fried mushrooms. I had some vegetable dish with cheese for the main course which dealt the lethal blow to my until then tolerant Indian palate. Such a tragedy!

We joked that we should all stop at the starters and move straight to dessert in restaurants as we’d found it impossible to finish food. Let me reach into my big bag of generalizations and declare that, somehow, being Indian gives us the most intense of experiences and tastes which in some strange way renders all other flavors too weak. Having a taste for strong Indian flavors has left me with nearly no taste for food from elsewhere. Unless we’re talking sweets. Oh, and Doritos. Which I stuffed my face with today.

We boarded at a hotel called Mercure. A nice, smart hotel that played amazing music in the lobby and had interiors in copper, maroon and gold. Our room, on the eighth floor, opened out to large windows across two of the walls looking out on exactly one half the city. I dozed off out of exhaustion and woke up at 3 a.m, feeling like an ass. Only to be treated to a magnificent view I will remember forever.