So the 9th through the 12th are going to be all in one blog. Not much happened. Just went to classes and got ready to go to Dublin and on spring break. I did laundry on the 9th and bought train tickets for mom and Tam on the 11th. Other than that just a week at school.
Rick
Today I slept in a little bit, worked on finalizing spring break plans, and worked on some homework. In the afternoon it rained and wow did it ever rain! It rained the hardest it has rained here yet, and then in 10 minutes the sun was shining and then 30 minutes later it was raining really hard again. It did this off and on all afternoon. It was weird. That night I talked to people at home and then went to bed.
Rick
I got up this morning at 6:20 to meet Wendy and Alyse to go to Oxford. We had to get a taxi since the buses do not run that early. We made it to the train station and got on our train. We it took about 2 hours to get there. When we got there, we walked past the castle, and then just walked around the city. We did go into part of the campus but campus was also all over town so it is kinda hard not to. The one building that we went into was where the part of the Harry Potter movies was filmed; it was the big dining hall in the movie. Other than that got souvenirs and enjoyed the nic
e weather and had a good day.
Rick
HEY EVERYONE START READING HERE!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Well Amanda left for Spain this morning so I got up and talked to her for a little while before she left. Then I went back to sleep and did not get up until 1, oops, I did not mean to do that. After I got up I worked on finalizing spring break. I booked hostels in Paris, Berlin, and Florence. Then I worked figuring out how to book night trains and all sorts so things. I think I figured out where I am going to go in Switzerland and how I am getting home. I basically worked on spring break all day. I stayed ended up staying up all night since I slept in so long, I talked to a few friends on the computer for a while and went to bed at about 4 in the morning. Oops. Oh well. W; H=45, L=34, Cloudy.
Rick
Had my 4 classes today, fluids was fluids, nothing different, but materials on the other hand. Since our regular professor broke his collar born, we are having a different professor teach us, we had Dr. Gil. He must be a higher level professor because he just taught that way. I don’t know how to explain it other than just things that he said and how he taught. In between classes I ate lunch at the cafeteria and then after my materials class I came back to the flat. I tried to go for a run I was so sore and hurt so much after I started that I just decided to cut it short today. I went back to campus for my last two classes, materials and statistics. Materials we had yet another professor, Dr Wood, to teach us how to do examples. This could be really interesting having three different professors teach us one class. I hope it goes well. Statistics is going better; I am starting to understand the class better now. So I hope I can do well in the class. After class I had pizza for supper and then talked to Amanda about spring break and all kinds of stuff since she is leaving in the morning to go to Madrid, Spain. W; H=40, L=28, mostly sunny.
Rick
It is amazing how I can be at ISU and like it when I have my first class at 9 in the morning (since the earliest is at 8, or even 7:30 for some), then when I get to Wales and the first class of the day is at 9, I sit and complain about it. Whatever. So I went to my classes again. Fluids we learned more about flowing fluids, I went to the library for an hour and then went to my second class. We sat there for 15 minutes and the professor never showed up. So I came back to the flat for a while and had lunch and worked on some stuff. I went back for my statistics class and then came back to the room. I talked to Amanda briefly and then went for a run. I was slow getting outside; I stretched for a while and was ready to leave when it started to rain. And boy did it rain, I was so glad that I was not in the middle of my run, I would have been soaked. After it quit raining the rain came out right away so I headed out. I did my 4 ½ miles in 33 minutes today. That’s 4 and ½ miles at 7 minutes and 20 seconds per mile. I stopped at the food store on my way back and then came back. Showered, ate supper and then talked to mom and Tam about spring break. W; H=37, L=29, rain and sun.
Rick
Tuesday, one class today, I like only having one class because then I don’t have to waste that hour in between classes. Econ is going alright. I actually understand it for the most part. After class I came back and had lunch and then worked on homework and this and that again. I decided to go for a run in between and during rain showers. It would rain for a 30 minutes and stop for 30 minutes. So rode the bus to campus this time to run from the beach back to my room. By I don’t know how great of an idea that was. Out of the 4 & ½ miles, 3 & ½ of it was up hill. That was one really good work out but boy did I hurt when I got done. I still did the run in about 45 minutes, which is not real great but considering how little I have run and that it was up hill I did not thing it was too bad. When I got back I showered and made supper and ate supper with Amanda on the webcam, and then worked on homework and spring break. It is amazing how long it takes to plan things out when you actually sit and think everything through. Weather; H=42 L=35, rain off and on all day.
Rick
I had my two classes on Monday, Fluids and Econ. We started a whole new topic in fluids today; we went from dealing with static fluids to moving fluids. So the class got a little bit hard but I don’t think it will be too bad yet. When I got back from class, I had lunch, relaxed for a while and then went for a run again. Other than that it was a pretty boring day. Weather; H=46 L=41 sunny
Rick
PS, I am going to start adding the weather just so I know what I was like when I was here. I should have started doing it two months ago.
Sunday I slept in a little bit, got up and made myself some lunch. I worked on spring break plans for a while and then went for a run in the afternoon. I found this nice park just outside of town where I can go for runs and be in with the woods for a while. It is about a mile run to the start of the park, then it is about 2 & ½ miles in the park and I end up running on or along the beach for about a mile. So, in total I run about 4 ½ miles. I blogged and talked to Amanda and had supper and worked on this and that until I talked to everyone at home. And that pretty much ended my day. Today’s weather, H=45, L=40 and sunny, nice day.
Take care everyone, nice to be able to talk to everyone for a while.
Rick
Today I went to Bath, England. I got up at about 6:30 because I had to walk to campus to get on the bus to leave since the town bus system does not start to run until 8 and the bus for bath left at 8. We had to wait for some person who was running late and she just about missed the bus. So we left campus at 8:20 and it took 2 hours to drive there. That made me a little worried since I wanted to go on a free walking tour at 10:30. I slept most of the drive there. We got to Bath at 10:25 and I just made it to the tour. I had about 2 minutes to spare.
The walking tour was really nice and very informative. We started about by the Bath Abbey, it is the cathedral there. The abbey standing today is the third church to be built on the same location after the first two were allowed to become ruins, there has been a church on the same site since 757A.D. The current church is a gothic style church that was completed in 1611. It was one of the last gothic style churches to be built in England. The carvings on the outside and inside of the church are magnificent. One of the previous churches was more than two times longer than the current one, it would have been huge. On the one end of the church there is a ladder on both sides with angles crawling up and down the ladder representing the path to the heavens. There is also a door on the church that was made in 1617 and is still is excellent condition, it was a gift from somewhere and is made from solid oak. After we left the church we were shown where some famous people lived and had their houses built. I can’t remember who they were and the houses were in the distance. The next thing we saw was part of the original wall the Romans had built around the city. The city of Bath over centuries has just continually being built up and up, meaning that buildings were built on the ruins of other buildings so the city is higher today than it was centuries ago. So this archway, which is the only one left, is now ‘underground’ or lower than street level.
One very interesting part about the city and what makes the city what it is, is how the outsides of the buildings look. The architects who built the city made the outside of the building look good and then worried about making the inside of the building useable. One way that they did this was to add fake windows to buildings. If you pay attention to building as you walk around you will see ‘windows’ that are all framed in and then the brick is just painted to make it look like a window. It really makes the city look nice. Some of the ‘windows’ that have not been painted in a while you can tell easier than other where that have been painted recently.
The next place we were shown was what use to be a hospital. It was built to help people who could not afford care as easily. To be admitted to the hospital you first had to write a letter to the hospital explaining what was wrong with you and then if they thought they could help you they would write a letter back letting you know to come in and to bring 3 pounds with you. The 3 pounds was to either pay for your trip home or to pay for your funeral if you did not make it. Today the building has been converted into a world renowned research center for arthritis. The guide then showed us a place where it is thought that many of those who died at the hospital had been buried. It is not known if there are actual bodies there since no one has do any digs to find any but there was a sign posted on the wall talking about it. Beside this suspected burial place was the other part of the original wall that used to surround the city. There was only about 30 feet of it left but it was cool to know how long it has lasted.
The next thing we were shown was the Royal Theater. It is one of those British things that they love the theater. During I think it was WWII, the theater got caught on fire but it was rebuilt and you can still see some of the stones on the outside walls were still red from the fire. The stones change colors when they are heated and that’s why they were red. After the theater, we went to Queens Square. In the middle of the square there is an obelisk that was built by Richard Nachisq “in memory of honours conferrd and in gratitude for benefits bestowd in the city by Fredrick Prince of Wales,” or at least that’s what it says on the monument. If I remember right I think that the guy was never really the Prince of Wales so that made some controversy somehow. Not really sure.
We left the square, we walked though a park, the park its self was not very interesting but along the one side of the trail was the back sides of houses and there was fence to give them privacy. Well, during the time before indoor plumbing, you had to have an outhouse and in that area they had to be cleaned out sometimes. Well in the wall or fence, you can still see where there use to be holes so that the cleaners could do their job. Also, on the back side of one of the houses there was a bathroom added on, but it was added onto the second floor. So there is this little room just sticking out the side of the house being supported up with some braces under the floor. They look goofy to say the least. The next thing we were shown was the Royal Crescent, which is a huge housing complex that has 30 houses in the shape of a haft ellipse. It was built between 1767 and 1774 and was designed by architect John Wood the Younger in a Georgian style. All 30 houses are identical with a total of 114 ionic columns in the front of the building. The building is 5 stories tall. One level is basement underground, three main stories and then the attic is also used for living quarters. The houses themselves are not small either and were built for the rich to live in. Today most are still individual houses but some have been converted into flats and 2 were made into a hotel and 1 is a museum showing life style in the 1700’s.
After the Royal Crescent we saw the Circus. It is like the Royal Crescent but in the shape of a circle and composed of 3 buildings. It was designed by the architect John Wood the Elder but finished by his grandson John Wood the Younger after his death. The buildings were built between the years of 1754 and 1768 and the design was an inspiration from the Roman Colosseum.
Another interesting fact that the tour guide told us was that under most all the streets and almost all the sidewalks were underground storage for the housed and stores. In previous times this was where the people stored their coal to heat their houses. To this day there are still stone manhole covers used. Some are many years old and are still used. With the use of coal as the heating source for many years, it tuned the city black from all the soot from the burning of the coal. Which is complete opposite of how the stone looks like when it is new; the stone when it is new is just about white. To clean the stone cold water is run over the building for 2 to 3 weeks and this cleans most of the soot off and makes the building look much better.
The next thing we saw was the natural hot springs that had been turned into a spa place. It was nothing fancy looking on the outside and we were not able to go in since you have to pay. The building was a very modern building and built for tourism. After that we walked back to where we started the tour and were told a few more little things about the church but that was it. That ended our tour; I then went and saw the Roman Bath.
The Roman Bath was cool. There was soooo much to see inside that it took forever to go through. The Roman Bath is a natural hot spring, one of very few in the UK, that the Roman’s discovered sometime before the 1st century when the Roman Empire controlled the area. When the Roman’s first used the hot spring as a worship area, they built two “pools.” The first was the natural hot spring, where the water came out of the ground. The second was built a little ways away and downhill so the water could flow from the first pool to the second one. Later, more and more pools or baths were added for different uses. The Roman’s used the baths for both worship areas and for a public bath for people to clean themselves. Since the Roman’s could not explain why the water was warm and why it bubbled out of the ground like it did, they believed that it was from the gods and so that was the reason for the baths being used as a worship place. The Roman’s were also big into personal hygiene, so it was only natural for them to use the water for bathing reasons. They even went as far as creating a round bath that has pressured water feed to it that made it into what would be similar to a modern day hot tub. They did this by lowering it into the ground more than other baths and feed the water through lead pipes, which part of the original pipes are still there today. Some of them would almost 2000 years old! The baths when they were first used were just baths for everyone, later there became male and female baths along with just general use. There were hot and cold baths as well. Now I know someone is going to say, well da, there was hot baths since it is a hot spring, but the Roman’s made them hotter. They did this by raising the floor level of some of the bathes leaving a “crawl space under the bath where hot air from a furnace was blown to heat the bath more. There were many different baths and each one had a different purpose and were all used at different times in history.
Other than the baths, there were many things to see in the Roman Bath. The baths themselves were only about 20% of what you got to see during your self-guided tour. You also got to see parts of what use to be the Temple of Sulis Minerva and the court years around the baths. All of the original Roman structures have collapsed over the ages and at one time most had had other building built over top of them including the baths themselves which were not rediscovered until the 1880’s. I don’t know how long that they were ‘lost,’ but they were not used for some time. Since they have all fallen down, there have been some excavations done to recover parts of them. A huge percent of the original temples and court yards are still buried under the building and streets around the bath. There was part of the temple called the pediment was found. That is the part that was over top of the entrance of the temple. It has very detailed carving on it even to this day. The parts that were left had a Golden Head carved in the middle along with oak leaves and even an owl.
In part of the court yard of the temple that has been excavated, they found the original entrance to the main bath. You can see how the stone has been worn down; you can only imagine how many people had to walk thought the door in order to wear it down as much as it is. Another thing that was found during some of the excavations was a piece of the roof that was over top of the Great Bath. It was made of hollow tile to reduce the weight of the building material but still give it strength to hold itself up. This shows us how great Roman engineering was, how thousands of years ago they could knew how to do all of this to make things better. In one of the baths that still has water in it, people have thrown money into it like a wishing well. In it there were a lot of coins, but there were also bills from the UK, US, Japan and who knows where. The funniest part was that someone threw their credit card into the bath. I am not joking; I have a picture of more than one in the water. (I spent over an hour and haft there)
Alright I will quit writing about the bath. I am sorry that this thing is so long.
After I got done with the bath, I grabbed a quick bite to eat from a sidewalk vender and then went to the Bath Abbey. This was one beautiful church, cathedral, or whatever you need to call it. It is one of those picture perfect sights that you see in advertising and stories and that type of thing. It was so pretty. One of the best features is the huge stain glass windows at each end of the church. The church had to be over 40 feet tall inside, and completely open to the ceiling. The church was build with flying buttresses, gothic style, which from an engineering aspect distributes the weight of the roof and walls and allows the walls to be built thinner. This in turn allows more and bigger windows to be incorporated into the design of the building. More windows allow more light to enter the building. There were two different window ‘areas.’ There were the lower windows which were all stained glass then there were the upper windows which were just clear glass.
The church had some awesome architecture in it. The pillars rose to the ceiling and them seemed to explode out across the ceiling. It kinda looked like webbing and had what looked sorta like clovers in the design. And one of the best parts was everything was still intact. There was not parts missing or broken, it was all there giving it a very smooth look, making it even more beautiful. The organ pipes were spectacular as well, they were tall and a lot of them and you just can’t explain all of this stuff on how beautiful it was.
The next thing that I went to see was the old bridge and dam on the river. The bridge is not an ordinary bridge; it has shops on each side of it. I guess it is nothing to spectacular but it was still cool. Then just down river from the bridge was a dam in the shape of a parabola and three layers to it making it look pretty cool. The dam is only a like 30 years old or something like that but it still made for a neat picture. After I got done looking at the bridge, I found this little indoor market, nothing exciting but in the middle of it there was a pig sculpture painted black with bird figures on it. The birds were not painted like bird but it looked almost like the pattern on a handkerchief. It was something different. After that I stopped and got a bit to eat and just started to walk around. I revisited some of the places that I saw on my tour and sat on a bench in front of the Royal Crescent for a while just relaxing. As I was walking I walked past the Jane Austen Centre, she was a famous novelist who had a unique style making her one of the most widely read and beloved writers of English literature. That pretty much ended my day. On the bus ride back I sat beside a girl by the name of Britney who was from Tennessee. We had a nice conversation about the day and got to know each other a little bit. It was nice to have someone to talk to on the ride. After I got back I did not do much other than talk to Amanda and went to bed.
Take care everyone at home. Sorry this took so long to get posted and that it is so long. Take care.
Rick
