The water isn't that bad...

I went to Sally Lunn's for lunch. It was a little expensive, but not too bad-- and apparently it's a staple here, so it was essential. I read in one of the guidebooks that Bath has more restaurants per capita than any other city in England, so I guess eating is just as much a part of the experience of being in Bath as visiting the Pump-Room or the Roman Baths or the Abbey.

No...

First, a little rant about pigeons. FEVER! (Sorry, song playing on the radio here.) When you sit in the Abbey Square, pigeons will get all up under your feet and you have to literally kick them away, or pretend that you're going to. And they are such ugly birds, with those little stupid eyes and big fat bodies. The fattest pigeon I saw yesterday must have been a beggar pigeon. He had a limp, with one of his feet all curled up. He hobbled around with his handicapped leg and fat body. The others just waddle. They will fly a little if you kick, as they startle, but if someone is walking behind them, they run on the ground. Their little plump bodies just wobble back and forth. As Zach would say, they're all fatties.

At Sally Lunn's, all of the waitresses were dressed in period costumes, apparently from the 1600's or something.

WAIT, I FORGOT SOMETHING FROM YESTERDAY. The 1600's thing reminded me. These two Americans came into the Jane Austen exhibit in the Museum of Costume, this older man and his kind of dumpy, a little bit older than teenage daughter. The man was like, "Oh, Jane Austen movies! I guess these costumes are all supposed to be from the 1890's or something." Okay, so I would have been okay with 1830's-50's. Like, that wouldn't have been so bad. But 1890's? Dude, that's almost the turn of the century! That's the Gibson girls, and the Spanish-American War. Sense and Sensibility takes places at the end of the 1700's! Okay, so I was annoyed by that. Then the dumpy daughter gets to the Emma exhibit. Now, the exhibit is very much like, "Ohhhhh dear, these silly Americans. The costumes aren't a bit accurate, and they wanted to make their main characters pretty. How shallow they are! La! Hollywood!" So here I am, Joey McGarvey, Ambassador of American Culture, giving equal time to all of the BBC adaptations, oohing and aahing over the Pride and Prejudice costumes. And all of my work unravels-- get it?-- when the dumpy daughter goes, "Oh, Emma! I've seen this! Now here's something I care about!" Great. Thanks, Ms. Dumpy, Ambassador of American Annoyingness.

Back to Sally Lunn's. It's the oldest building in Bath, and serves the Sally Lunn bun, a very light bread. I sat upstairs in the Jane Austen room. What a find, this shrine to Jane Austen. The Jane Austen room seemed to have no connection to Austen-- nothing in its decorations distinguished it from the rest of the restaurant-- although I saw six green books in a bookhelf in the corner, so I suppose those might have been the novels. Sally Lunn's also serves the Jane Austen cream tea (with clotted cream and raspberry jam) and Jane Austen coffee. Jane Austen coffee is a "clever blend," with "no bitterness detected in the cup." Strange. I'd never thought that coffee could be a medium for literary criticism, but there it is. "Clever blend" imitates Austen's writing and attempts a description of her, and "no bitterness detected in the cup" is sort of a bizarre rewriting of Virginia Woolf's criticism A Room of One's Own, in a description of a beverage.

I, however, ordered a sandwich made from a toasted Sally Lunn bun with chicken breast, smoked bacon, and cheddar cheese. Bacon here is essentially very thinly sliced ham-- by which I mean it really isn't the thin, narrow strips of the United States. It's hard to describe. It's a staple of my breakfast (I've definitely got my regular breakfast now, I think I've mentioned it all before though). It was good in the sandwich. But really, the distinguishing feature of the meal was the drink. I ordered a soft drink, "Traditional Dandelion and Burdock." I went to use the restroom after ordering and when I came back, there it was in a glass on my table. I forgot what I had actually ordered and thought that perhaps it was a diet Coke, because it was caffeinated and dark brown. But oh no. Only the first moment of taste was anything like a Coke. It is much, much sweeter, in a sort of sickly way. The taste is basically like drinking liquid licorice. It was unpleasant, but the aftertaste quickly died away, so it wasn't as unpleasant as it could have been.

At the next table over was a British couple and an American woman. All three were very overweight, with little pinheads and a very dull, bland appearance. I eavesdropped. They weren't dull to listen to, really. The American woman had a very light Southern accent, and I guessed she must be from the Midwest or Florida. When we got to talking, I found out she was from Oklahoma. Okay, with my defense of their intelligence a moment ago, I feel bad saying this, but they originally talked to me because they couldn't figure out how to open their very basic and ordinary three-panel menu. Um. As I listened to them talking together, the American woman say, "I just remember those rugged cliffs slamming into the sea and-- and--" It's that sort of bizarre pseudo-poeticism. It's bad enough when my writing takes that on, but when anyone does it while speaking and can't carry it off: really bad. And that's a direct quote, by the way. I was taking notes at my table, which I think might have freaked out the waitresses.

A man at another table had a voice like Alan Rickman's. Unfortunately, he was so massively unattractive-- not all that fat, not really ugly, just generally unattractive-- that not even the voice could save him. Alan Rickman is lucky to have-- why is "You Give Me Fever" playing again?-- FEVER-- good looks as well as the voice.

I'm writing from my notes now, and I have a question jotted down. Is the reason why you breathe in after drinking alcohol because alcohol evaporates so quickly, so you can rapidly clear the taste from your mouth? Or does the air have a different function? Does it work with other drinks? (This comes from that dandelion drink.) Ooh, if you want to read about the other bizarre beverage I drank today, keep reading. Okay, I also liked the sugar cubes. Whatever. They were irregularly-shaped, with both white sugar and brown sugar cubes.

Next I went to the Roman Baths museum. I tried to take pictures. I still haven't been able to charge my camera, but I've found if I turn it off for a couple of minutes, I can get enough power to take another picture. So I squeezed some in, and I've put those online. I'll keep trying to figure out how to charge the camera, anyway. The Baths were very nice. I put my hand in the water, and it was indeed very warm. The water was also green. Only a couple of things particularly moved me there. Well, I liked seeing the steps where people descended into the Baths during the Georgian period. I also liked seeing the mist curling off the surface of the Baths, both the main bath and the King's Bath. The spiralling was very beautiful. I liked the frigidrium, where the Romans went as a last step after goin through the baths and the heated rooms. It was lit with green spotlights, and the pool was deep-- about 5 feet. The room was cold. The Romans left sacrifices, including metal plates inscribed with wishes and curses, in the baths, so there was a sign posted in the frigidarium saying that we could use that pool as a wishing well. I threw a penny in and made a wish. It would have been nice if I could have taken a picture, but alas. In parts of the pool, there were so many coins that the bottom was completely coated with silver, with flecks of copper and gold. The green lights made the silver look tarnished.

A note on one of the curses-- the letters were so squashed and badly-written that a modern historian believes the writer was dyslexic. Most of these curses run along the lines of "Whoever stole my finest pair of gloves has gone against you, O Goddess, and should be made to pay with loss or with blood."

After the museum, I went upstairs to the Pump-Room. I'll be going there tomorrow for afternoon tea, but I decided to try the infamous bath water today. I've heard that it's so awful that you want to take it back, or spit it out. But it's pretty cheap-- fifty pence a glass. There is a little water bar in the Pump-Room just for people to try water. I bought a glass and was surprised. The taste isn't so bad-- our cold mineral water is much worse. But I could not finish the glass. The water was warm, first of all. The taste wasn't bad, just slightly earthy and salty. The smell was much worse. When you go to drink and your nose is in the glass, you can smell this salty, warm, slightly eggy smell. It's terrible, sort of sulfurous. I drank the first half of the glass pretty easily and then couldn't go any farther. I did meet a few American tourists who were also trying water. I had some trouble at first-- I can't tell American accents as easily as I could before, and I don't know why. Everything just sounds the same now. The tourists were from a town about two hours north of Lexington, Kentucky.

And now I'm here. I was going to go on a tour tonight, and it's still a possibility, but I'm pretty tired. I was going to go home to nap, but I ended up spending longer than I anticipated at the museum, and it would have been useless to make the trek. So now I can spend the next two hours at Caffe Nero, doing stuff on the internet, and then get dinner somewhere, and try to do one of the walks again. Or I can grab dinner and then go back to my room and sleep like crazy.

I've been eating so much. I'll get nice and plump before going to Oxford. Like a sleek racehorse. Or a Thanksgiving turkey.