Bath

The weather reports are amusing here... every 12 hours or so they flip flop. If you check the weather in the evening and it says partly cloudy tomorrow, in the morning it will say rain, and vice versa (though, sadly, less often vice versa). So I wonder why I check the reports at all?

Even in the rain, Bath is lovely, I just wish I had better shoes. I was afraid it would be touristy, but though there were heaps of visitors, it still felt real. There are nice shops everywhere, so it feels more like a downtown.

Our hotel is a lovely B&B called Dorian House, just up the hill on the opposite side of the river. It has great views of town, and everyone has lovely gardens. The area is all big Georgian houses made of the same cream-colored stone as the rest of Bath.

We checked out the Georgian rowhouses at the Royal Circus and the Royal Crescent, but they were not more interesting than the rest of town.

Lunch was at a tiny pub... the smallest in Bath, they said. It was about the size of my sister's bedroom in Manhattan. We sat at the bar and had the full-on English Pub experience, complete with friendly barmaid, strapping young yokel, and loud and drunk but gregarious and intelligent barfly. We chatted with the barfly a while. When we said we'd been in Cardiff he gave us the sort of look you'd give a person who said they'd been to Cleveland. Why would you go if you didn't have to? Well, Cardiff was nice, and so, for that matter, is Cleveland. But they are not obvious choices. To eat, I had a fisherman's pie (barfly comment: "the game is, try to find the fish!" — there was plenty of fish), and Eric had a pork pie. And of course, we had more ale. (I find myself referring to drining beer often — but in fact, almost always we are drinking "real ale", the significance of which is somewhat lost on me, but which seems to be vaguely akin to having a "microbrew" in the US: it's code for "better".

We took a tour of the Roman baths, which were really fascinating. As part of the tour you are entitles to drink a glass of the waters as you leave. For heath, people used to drink as much as a gallon a day. It's described as an "acquired taste", but I can describe it better; it's like water from a broken drinking fountain: hot and metallic and generally unpleasant. We downed the glasses, though — an act of will, but perhaps to some salutory effect.

We'd bought tickets to the Royal Theater, and found ourselves without time for a proper early supper or tea, so we split a packaged BLT from Sainsbury's. The play was a double bill, called "Single Spies" — two somewhat related plays by Allen Bennet. The first ("An Englishman Abroad") was just OK; I think the playwright wasn't sure how to tell the story, and the actors seemed really unsure of how to approach the characters. The result was too broad, though still entertaining. The second play ("A Question of Attribution") was better in every way. The story and the acting were so much more nuanced. The actors seemed to really inhabit the parts.

Afterward we went to the pub next door for beer ("Beech Blonde" for me and IPA for Eric) and a snack (a sort of venison bresaola, they said, though it wasn't much like bresaola, plus some olives). We gabbed for a while and got to bed a little late.

Labels: england, journal, united kingdon

posted by Tony at 11:59 PM | 2 comments

Bristol

We arrived safely in London this morning... we scored upgrades to business class, which made an enormous difference in how much and how well we slept, and therefore how jetlagged we are now. So that was very nice.

On arrival we took the Heathrow Express to Paddington Station, where we were to catch our train to Bristol. Everything went so much more smoothly than we'd feared (Heathrow can be a mess), and we ended up with over an hour to kill at Paddington. Fortunately it was lunch time.

We went to a Fuller's Pub in the station, where we each had a pint (ESB for Eric, and a blonde called "Discovery" for me) and a sandwich (we shared two: cheddar with chutney, and sausage with pickled cabbage). It was all quite good. I confess I've been afraid of English food — people complain about it so much — but this was just good, basic pub food.

We got on the train for Bristol, and rolled all the way across southern England. From what I saw, the countryside was beautiful, but we were both asleep most of the time. (One reason we decided to go directly to Bristol after London was so we'd have a train trip where we could sleep.)

Bristol is a nice town. It has a good vibe. I like visiting cities that feel like people live there. Bristol is not touristy, but there are people everywhere. Much of it is new, since a lot was flattened in the war, but the new architecture is pretty nice, and there's enough old architecture to maintain interest.

It's also quite hilly. One of the things we did was to climb up to Cabot's Tower, which is in a park atop the tallest hill, overlooking all of Bristol. When we got to the top I couldn't believe we'd climbed so far up — it hadn't seemed like that much. The tower itself was closed for renovations, but you can see plenty from the park.

For dinner we went to the Hole in the Wall, which is a pub off Queen's Square, in the old city and near the harbor and which is reputed to be the model for the "Spyglass Inn" (or something?) in Robert Louis Stevenson' Treasure Island. That's not why we went, though; we went because I'd heard the food was good. It's a creative take on traditional pub food. The inside is homey — mismatched furniture, etc. The food was good. We started with a chicken liver patê served with toast and rowanberry and apple jelly, which was very good. Then I had a pork, apple, and wild boar sausage with caramelized onion mashed potatoes (basically a fancy bangers-and-mash), and Eric had the pot pie of the day, which was beef and vegetable. These weren't as good as the appetizer, but they were still good. The beer selection was not as good a this place — mostly mass-market beers. I had a Stella Artois and Eric had a bitter called something like Timothy Thompson's.

Now we are back in our hotel, and ready for bed.

Incidentally, I don't expect to post every day like this. We didn't bring the laptop. However, this hotel, surprisingly, comes with a computer in the room (The City Inn Bristol — nice place!), and so I'm taking advantage of it.

Tomorrow: Cardiff!

Labels: england, journal, united kingdom

posted by Tony at 9:50 PM | 0 comments