Today my life was made complete! I saw David Beckham play football (soccer) at Wembly Stadium and the English Nationals team won. It was the ultimate English experience. I'm uploading some photos in the March album on Picasa and there will be more group photos when I get them from other people's cameras. I still haven't figured out the deal with my camera, I don't completely trust it. Alicia's friend, El was able to get tickets, and has a car, so he drove us into London. England won 4-0 (or 4-nil as the English would say).

Then Jan, Alicia, Oscar, our new friend El, and I went to this amazing restarant called TinselTown. Well it was more like a 50's inspired diner. They were made famous by their milkshakes. Anything that you can blend, they will make into a milkshake. Instead of using a lot of ice cream, they use frozen custard or something. It was very different. We also ate there. Amazing food. I got a Rollo milkshake and a hotdog on a baguette-yes, I know I have a problem. I'm obsessed! They literally poured a bunch of the Rollo candy in and blended it up. It was one of my favorite days thus far in England.

Paris II

Me in front of the famous pyramid in the courtyard of the Louvre

On Sunday we woke up and Brittney said she had to do some homework and would just stay home while I went to the Musee du Louvre or the Louvre to us. She walked me there, about fifteen minutes, and asked if I could get back. My palms always start sweating when I do anything new on my own. I paid and started wondering around. I was on a somewhat limited time schedule considering the Louvre could be done in days and I had plans to meet back up with Brittney that afternoon. I prioritized and decided first I needed to see the Mona Lisa just to say I did. First I was in the sculpture area. There were about 200 sculptures made out of that white stone or mable and they were just so steriotypical. I saw Venus and you are thinking that she's really cool when she's in books and you can see why it's such a famous sculpture. But then when you see it next to hundreds of other sculptures and they all look the same, you are wondering who picked that one and told everyone that that was the best? So, I was already bored. I think of art as boring old paintings of people's faces, naked mothers with fat, angelic looking children, and then the white sculptures. I wanted to see something different. And I had already seen on the map that they had African, Greek, Egyptian, and Iranian art so I was eager to get to these places. I pretended to be intelligent, stopping to peer at paintings occasionally on my way to the Mona Lisa.

I finally found it and I knew I was there because there were a crowd of about 200 people and they were all jumping up and down trying to take pictures over people's heads. I thought Elvis had come back to life or something. The closest I could get to the picture was about 200 feet away because of the crowd. There were armed guards and the picture is under about two feet of glass. The darn thing is only a footxfoot painting. I thought it would be bigger. I was sad that I had searched all this time to find it. I thought I would just quickly skim through the rest of the French/Italian paintings.

I found some that I really liked called Large Scale French Paintings. These were about thirty foot by thirty foot paintings. Many of them were like crowds of people as opposed to the smaller ones which are usually just one or two people up close. They depicted scenes, there were battle scenes, the coronation or some queen and all the people in the background, and people at balls. These were the only paintings I liked. I loved that if you looked hard enough, there were always one or two people in the background with something funny, either a funny look on their face, or in one instance, a couple was making out behind a curtain, which you could see you looked hard enough. I liked that the artists depicted the side characters as well, besides just the rich person who comissioned the painting.

I'm still really upset my camera erased the pictures. While all the signs in the huge lobby were in French, English, Spanish, and an Arabic Language, all the little faceplates with the paintings' names and descriptions were solely in French. So I took a lot of photos of the artwork and the paintings and I was going to come home and research them. My French history isn't great, so when I was looking at the "Objects of Art" which was basically like things obtained from the houses of royalty, I didn't know most of the royalty. Seeing their things, plates in gold, rich fabrics, and crystals, made me want to know more about them.

They also had Egyptian art. It was exactly as you'd expect. All the statues, sculptures, and coffins had a head with long hair and that striped headpiece they wore. The Greek stuff was cool. It was really old. They had six rooms of just terracotta, pots with pictures on them. The pictures were made of some kind of black stone. No joke, they looked like the pots on the cartoon movie Hercules that the narrative women jump off of. There were also tablets with Greek writing and a bunch of tiny figurines. The Iran/Iraq/Mesopotamia area I thought would be the most entertaining, however, it was the area with the oldest stuff and much of it was only partially intact.

I moved then to Napoleon III's apartments. This was ridiculous. My first impression was new money/tacky. It showed what "great wealth" meant at the time. Everything was plated in gold, including the walls, crushed red velvet was everywhere with gold thread. Everything was big. Huge chandeliers, oversized furniture, gold threaded carpet, murals on the wall, pull cords to signal attendants. I can't get over how red everything was. A friend was able to put it in perspective though, we see certain things as a show of wealth not because they are necessarily more becoming than items regular people have, but because they are hard to get or expensive to buy. This is probably Napoleon's philosophy. That was amazing because they had recreated the apartments with every aspect including his wallpaper, light fixtures, staircases, rugs and flooring, furniture, dishes, fireplaces, everything. The African exhibit was closed.

I'm sure I missed explaining so much, but it just made me feel more intelligent, like I'd experienced a little piece of history by seeing these things. I only wish I knew more about them! I made my way back to Brittney's, once again beaming because I'd gotten back by myself. We went and walked around Luxembourg Gardens, kinda like the Central Park of Paris. Interesting fact: children have to pay to use play equipment at parks. The swings are in tiny stalls, small enough that the parent must stand outside the stall and push their kids. The set of stalls is surrounded by a locked fence, you have to go through the pay booth to get in. There was also a complete playground, you had to pay to enter that as well. I decided that it would cut down on pedophiles and people snatching kids, because you can only leave with the child you came with and no creepy, lurkers can just enter because the whole thing is surrounded by twenty foot fencing and has a net roof over the top. I was shocked. Everyone, rich or poor, should be able to take their children to the park.

After getting used to people driving on the wrong side of the car and road, I go to Paris to find that they drive like American's and I almost got killed. We walked around some more. We stopped for lunch at this place where I got a foot-long hotdog in a baguette. I had something similar in Amsterdam. This is quickly becoming my new favorite food. We watched the sun set over the Eiffel Tower in another park as we sat by a fountain, where they had chairs for people to use that weren't chained to the ground. In the US, those chairs would have been gone in a day!

That night we decided to go out to a nice dinner. We were walking along looking at menu's and this guy ran out of the restaurant and promised us free wine if we came in. We decided to eat there because you could get an appetizer and entree for relatively cheap. I wanted to repay Brittney in some way for letting me crash at her house for four days and taking the time to introduce me to her friends and show me all around Paris. Our waiter was out of control. At one point we asked him to take a picture of us, and he took the camera and held it two feet away from Brittney's face. We were like no, of both of us! He spoke every language too. Everything someone was outside the door he would drop what he was doing, leave candles blowing out and dishes crashing in his wake as he raced out of the restaurant to personally persuade people to come in. They would say, "hablo espanol" and he was like "oh, hola, como estas?" We told him, "Sorry we only speak English" he was like "oh, come in come in." He also spoke French and who knows what else. The waitor made our night. I realized why he was so outgoing too, he finished two bottles of wine while we were there. He was drinking under the counter!

I got the French Onion Soup and for my main meal potatoes and steak. We were at dinner for at least three hours. That's how European countries are though, you don't just go in to eat, they are very slow at bringing your food on purpose so you have time to converse. We decided to go big since we both admitted neither of us really eats out. We ordered the chocolate fondue with fruit. It was amazing. We left the restaurant at 11:30 pm, that place was packed and people were still coming. They eat dinner late. We walked, more wobbled actually, back to Brittney's place and went to bed.

I got up really early the next morning since my flight was at 9am. I thanked Brittney and she showed me to the train. I took the train to the airport, plane to Luton, UK, then took a bus from there back to school. I still had class an hour after I got back. I was exhausted and slept the rest of the day. What a whirlwind vacation!

Paris I

Unfortunately, even though I got a new (very nice) camera and memory card for this trip, on the two out-of-country excursions I have taken, my camera has deleted all my pictures. After taking about 300 photos in Paris, I have 12 to show for it. Everything is gone. I will probably have to end up paying a techie person a few hundred dollars to recover my photos. This is not looking good. I might not even take my camera on my upcoming Easter Break :(

Despite having no photographic evidence, I did indeed go to Paris on March 20th, Friday. This is the first trip I went on by myself, and needless to say, I was a little nervous. Afraid that I would get lost, somewhat nervous to stay with a girl I hardly knew, and worried about the language barrier. I'm happy to say that all of these worries were quickly dispelled. There might be a lot of grammar errors in this post, but I have a lot to write and no time to edit. Sorry!

I arrived at about 9pm at the Charles DeGaulle Airport, just outside of Paris with only my backpack. I sucessfully made my way out of the airport (small victories, but I am beaming with pride because I can get lost in my own apartment building that I've lived in for months so...) and bought a train ticket and got on the right train. This sounds pretty simple, but you had to be there to know what a complex process this was. It involved taking several wrong turns, asking directions repeatedly, being conviced that I was going the wrong direction on the wrong train, and tying to decipher signs in French. I was very on edge. Then after I got on the train, the annoucer pronouced the stops in such a way (by in such a way, I mean in French) that even given the written options on the map, I didn't know where we were. I had to watch and learn.

These are minor skills that maybe most people have picked up but I'm just beginning. Normally I just have my ipod on and I'm oblivious to my surroundings. But no, this was my thought process: I wanted to get off the train soon, so I start watching to see if you had to signal the driver for your stop. No, no one else was. How did the doors open? The weren't opening automatically. Then I saw someone get off and they released this lever on the door. How do you know what stop we are at if you can't understand the annoucer? Oh, wait, there are huge signs at the stop, on the wall, that say the name of the stop.

The other thing that got me through was that I had researched the train and the stops and what to do online. Also, it turns out, every French person speaks English. I asked a man on the train if he spoke English because I had a question, he looked at me like "of course I do," so then I stopped asking people that first, and just assumed everyone spoke English. The only words I used were merci and pardon. Thanks and sorry (you bump into people a lot.)

Thoughts like these were racing through my mind as I got off at the Luxemburg stop. I was able to use my phone, thank goodness, and called Martha's friend Brittney who met me at the station. Oh another important word "sortie" means exit. Often times the exits are really confusing too. We walked to her apartment. She lives alone. She was a great hostess, which made me feel insecure about my hostess skills. I would assume that a guest would tell me what they needed because I'm foreward like that. However, Brittney was very thoughtful, she asked if I wanted food, made me feel very welcome in her apartment, and bought me a welcome bottle of champagne! The French style of housing just reinforces what I think about Europeans in general, nothing in excess. The food is small portions in tiny packaging and Brittney's apartment, like most of the housing in France is TINY. It was a studio with a bathroom as big as one on a plane. A shower so tiny you can't bend down in it. A stove with two burners and no oven. Yet, it was beautifully decorated and she had a large bed. Her apartment came pre-furnished so there was no shortage of dishes and pans.

After decompressing we went out to a part at one of her friend's houses. I met exchange students from Norway and Holland (who all spoke English with no accent whatsover. Makes me really insecure about not being bilingual) as well as American and French natives. Everyone had a great time. So weird, the host's landlady who was about 70 came to party with the young'ns. Also, this French boy was after me. He told me the best pickup line I've ever heard... I'll write it how he said it, "Ivv you vvvere from my country, I'd make you my vvvife."- If you were from my country, I'd make you my wife and went on to say that I'd live with him and he'd buy me a house. Who said American girls like to hear that? I think he's been watching too much MTV. Meeting all those people was fun. We took the metro (underground train) home at six am. It was funny to be walking around Paris while the sun was coming up and people were all going to work.

Brittney and I woke up the next morning ready to see some sites. I was hungry so we got what looked like partially cooked baguette sandwhiches jambon and fromage (ham and cheese) and he put them in a pannini maker and they came out flat panninis. That is going to bother me for eternity, how can a rounded piece of hard bread become a soft, flat sandwhich. Then we went to Shakespeare and Co which was my favorite thing we had seen.. ok well it was the first thing but I loved it! It's a tiny book store where the books are all in English and the idea is that aspiring artists can stay upstairs for free if they work at the bookstore when they aren't writing. This has resulted in some of the best artists throughout time having passed through there. Also, sometimes they sign a few copies of their books over to the store, so you might buy a famous book to find out that is has been signed by the author themselves. It just had a very intellectual tone to the store. Old and new books were piled in every available space. I loved it so much, I could have stayed for hours.

But no, we were off to Notre Dame. This was a huge, beautiful church. I visited so many churches that I almost feel Catholic. The artwork was amazing. These are the churches that the ones in the US are modeled after. Catholic churches in the US try to be opulent. These really were, they were almost like an art museum with ceiling paintings, sculptures, engravings and carvings on every available surface. However, I don't know how people worship there with a steady flow (I mean there was actually a procession line of tourists weaving through the church snapping photos and being loud) of tourist when the patrons of the church are supposed to go there to reflect and pray.

Then we took the metro, which is the underground railway, to Sacre Coeur. The metro is the main way of getting around in Paris. Granted that London has the Underground, but it is so expensive, the preferred method of transportation is the double decker busses. The metro, though, was only about 1.10 euro each ride. They don't charge by distance, you only have to swipe your ticket to get into the station, then you can ride the train as far as you want. The steps of Sacre Coeur are a gathering place, it looked like the steps of the Capitol Building in the 60s. At least 200 people were sitting really close and a band was singing Beattles songs and everyone was waving their hands in the air. We entered the church, it is the highest place in Paris so you can see the entire city from there.

Then we went to the Eiffel Tower. Like most of the tourist attractions, overrated. However, I like that you can see it from almost anywhere in Paris because they don't have a lot of super super tall buildings. The street preformers make Paris. Anywhere you walk, there is always free entertainment to be had. We saw a guy who climbs lamp posts while spinning a ball on his nose, African drummers, break dancers, a piano player, a guy who cuts profiles of people out of paper in about 1.5 minutes, painters, acordian and harmonica players. Sometimes they would get on the metro and the whole car would start having a singing/dancing party. Especially at night when, I swear, 3/4 of the people on the metro were drunk drunk.


We walked through a park and went back to Brittney's. We stopped at the store and picked up stuff to make dinner. We went back to her place and made the best dinner ever! This really weird, spiral/curly spaghetti. I had a good time on the noodle isle. They had a bunch of mini shapes. Penne that was smaller than a bulletin board pin and all the other shapes in miniature forms. I even brought some to bring back with me! We also got peppers to put in our maranara sauce. At this store, you must take your fresh produce to the weighing man. That is someone's whole job, to stand there and preweigh your food. Also I walked by the meat department. That meat was FRESH. There was poultry with the head still on. The chicken still had some feathers. Some sea creatures I had never seen before and I swear there were cephalopods that were still alive. I was freaking out. I was like we need to leave. So we made our pasta, sauce, and salad.

Later that night we took the metro back to the Eiffle Tower to see the light show. I thought it was going to be like neon search lights and pulsing colors, instead it just looks like the tower is covered in little Christmas tree lights that sparkle. It was cool though. Then we walked down Champs-Elysees, which is like the famous shopping/restaurant street. We also saw the Arc De Triumph which was errected for fallen soldiers after a war.

There was a McDonalds on every corner throughout Paris. One of them was even a McDonald's restarant. You ordered on touch screens and there were nice tables and music playing. Yet, no Starbucks anywhere- there are a ton in London so I was surprised. As Brittney told me, the culture is that coffee is a social activity, you don't take it to go. And there were at least three cafes on every block. All had outdoor seating and the smallest tables you've ever seen. The funniest thing is that they would have two chairs on the same side of the table, facing the street. Every table was set up for people watching, and they aren't subtle about it either. Sometimes they'd even have three chairs on the same side of a table that couldn't have been more than 20 inches in diameter. And they would fit several of these tables in a tiny outdoor space (I go back to my "no excess" observation).

Then we went back home and went to sleep. Thus concludes my first full day. More soon.

Last weekend, Jansher, Stacy and I went to Oxford. The most entertaining part was seeing all the rowing teams. Apparently rowing is huge there. They live on the Thames and they had all these boathouses, each with a coat of arms for that team and about 15 long boats inside a huge garage. On top was a room that was surrounded by windows, and from what we could see, looked like a country-club bar or something. We also went to lunch at the Eagle and Child pub, where C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkein used to meet. I didn't realize how many popular authors attended Oxford.

The cathedral was also amazing. It was strange because our churches, even Catholic ones, are mainly a place of worship. This was a museum/place of worship. That's how the entire school was. I would not want to attend, daily, a world land-mark. I would get so tired of the tourists and think, this is my school!

Oxford is best described by my photos which I have posted. However, even though Robby lived there for a summer, after three hours there, Jan, Stacy, and I had seen enough of the town. It was really fun though, and might not have been as entertaining if I hadn't been there with friends.

In only a few days, I will be going to Paris! I'm excited. I'm also semi-nervous because I have heard that the French are stuck up. I also think that I won't be able to see everything in just one weekend. I'm staying with Martha's friend, Brittney, so I didn't want to invite myself for a whole week, and I also have school of course. Everyone will be leaving me for St. Patty's day in Ireland. Where better to spend it an Irish holiday? And tickets are about $40 round trip! Unfortunately, I have school and an immunology lab that I cannot miss.

Wednesday was Stacy's birthday, so we went out to The Font, the disco (meaning club) on campus. That was fun. I wore animal print leggings and a shirt with a jaguar on it. I was endlessly teased for my choice of outfit. Why did I wear it?.... because I can. I think Stacy had a good time, as she said, usually her birthday falls on a weekday but no one can do anything, so it usually goes unnoticed.

The girls- Ashlee is hiding

Other than that,I have just been trying to keep up with school, which is really hard here. I had an abstract with the due date of "week 26", so I completed it and brought it to class on Thursday assuming that it was to be turned in in class. Oh no! Of course not. I neither had the right date, nor location. You must print off a coversheet with a barcode. Then you have to submit it in the "Life Sciences reception" in a building where we don't even have class. And I should have known that first year classes always have the due date of assignments on Wednesday, and second year classes on Thursday and so on. When you go there they scan your paper and give you a receipt. Then your teacher grades it. Then a teacher in the sciences field grades it. The grades are averaged. Then for quality control, your papers are sent off to a third-party grading site where all the universities from the UK send theirs to ensure that they all grade comparably. Then you get your paper back 2+ months later. This is the same for my Spanish tests as well. Before you get the grades on the first three, you have already taken the fourth and final one. You get them all back around the end of the semester. That doesn't really give you a chance to know how you are doing and improve. The system is so strange here, and with 10% of the school being international students, you'd think teachers would do a better job of explaining the process.

U.S. News & World Report now ranks San Jose State seventh in the nation in terms of ethnic diversity among colleges and universities conferring bachelor's and master's degrees. That's up from 12th last year.

"College-bound students who believe that studying with people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds is important will want to consider student-body diversity when choosing a school," wrote the magazine's editors. "To identify colleges where students are most likely to encounter undergraduates from racial or ethnic groups different from their own, U.S. News factors in the total proportion of minority students; leaving out international students; and the overall mix of groups. The data are drawn from each institution's 2007-2008 student body."

Yay San Jose State!

Cheers to temporary friends (keep reading to find out what that means)

I put photos of my room on Picasa.
http://picasaweb.google.com/brianacoles
It was finally clean enough to take pictures! Actually that's not true, it is always clean. If not from my compulsive organizing, just out of necessity. It's such a small space, and with it being so wet and muddy here, the floor is so dirty. Therefore, clothes or anything else you want to keep clean, cannot be thrown on the floor.

Upcoming Travels: I will be traveling to Oxford tomorrow with Jan and Stacy. We are still deciding what we want to do there.
Next weekend I will probably be going to London, where they celebrate St. Patrick's Day on Sunday.
On the weekend of March 20-23 I will be traveling to Paris!!!!! and hanging out with Brittney- who Martha introduced me to.

Another update about my future travels: I was offered a research position at Dartmouth in New Hampshire this summer. The research is part of the Medical School, and this particular laboratory focuses on Immunology and Microbiology. The job comes with great perks including a stipend and the program covers food, housing, plane ticket to and from, free GRE prep courses, and the opportunity to meet the Dartmouth Graduate School admissions officers. It is also nice because the program doesn't start until half way through the summer (while many started half way through May) so I will still have time to travel for a month after school gets out. It is very likely that I will accept, making this the ultimate year of travel.

After returning from my studies abroad, I will have seen at least 9 different countries where at least 6 different languages are spoken. Then I will be in Boise for, at most, two days before flying across the U.S. to the East Coast, where I have never been before. From what I've heard, this is a totally different atmosphere than the West Coast. I have never really been out of the West, besides my trip to Louisiana (the South is a culture shock in itself), so this opportunity is amazing. The program runs until nearly the end of the summer where I would fly home for a few days before returning to San Jose for my SENIOR year of college! This is a time of big change, and I feel as if I can hardly call Boise my home anymore. Sadly, I feel that it is more the place I "once" lived :(
Now, whatever bed I'm sleeping in for the time being is my home. After a week here, I was already calling my dorm-room in Hatfield "home."

I really haven't gotten homesick here. I miss family but I've been so busy that I'm never lonely so I don't really just sit around and think about what I'm missing in the States. It could also be that while many of the exchange students have lived with or within driving distance of their parents throughout college, I haven't lived near my mom or dad since I started college and even in high school I was very independent. Many of the students are sad because they missing their mother doing their laundry, or missing their cars or pets, while I just feel that is the stage of life we are in right now. College students are extremely nomadic, until we get our first jobs and start buying furniture. But maybe that's just me.

I realized (as most of you probably have as well) that I'm just kind of an odd person. When I explained my theory of temporary friends, I think I offended people here. I just realized that this is the twelfth in a long line of schools I've attended in the last 16 years including: Sand Castles, Koelsh, Taft, Middleton Heights, Middleton Middle School, Cole Valley Christian, Bishop Kelly, Boise High School, University of Idaho, San Jose State, Treasure Valley Community College (summer), and now University of Hertfordshire. In this time, I've realized that friends come and go. I made new friends at all the schools and I left friends too. Every new place I go, there will always be new people to meet, friends to be made. If I tried to maintain even one really good friend at each school, I would spend all my time trying to keep those friendships strong and would miss out on making new friends. I live in the now and was brutally honest with Jan and Stacy and told them that even though we are going through this life-changing experience together, I'll leave San Jose after graduating and probably not see them again. Even when we get back to San Jose, we won't be hanging out all the time like we do now. Needless to say, they were not pleased. So now it is everyone's favorite joke to say things like.. "So... I've got about three more months left on our friend contract," or "Hello, this is my temporary friend Briana. Briana this is my permanent friend Steve." So the lesson that you should take away from this is not to hold on to dear friends, but instead, just don't inform them that you don't plan to be friends in the future.

See more at http://picasaweb.google.com/brianacoles

Last Saturday, Feb 21st, I went on a school-sponsored trip to Stonehenge and the Roman Baths. Both were somewhat disappointing. Stonehenge was first. Our school chartered two buses for us, the journey was about 1.5 hours. When we pulled up to Stonehenge there was an audible "uhhh" gasp from the bus. We had all seen photos of the looming, massive rocks, however, in reality, the rocks are not that big... I'm thinking photographers use photoshop or really work their angles. Granted, the rocks are a long ways from where that type of rock can be found, and there are huge rocks sitting on top of other huge rocks, but I much expected to see 100 foot tall boulders instead of the 12foot rocks that were there. Not all of the original structure is present. It is believed that it took 25 generations of people to build Stonehenge. A friend reminded me, its completion for those people was as amazing as us finally flying to the moon. After seeing Stonehenge, I, personally, think that it was some kind of alter because there are rocks on the ground in the center of the circle that look like they are set up for ceremonies to take place. Other theories include that it was a cemetery, people came there to be healed, it was an ancient observatory, and the most hilariously, that it was an alien landing site. I think we will never know what it meant to the people that constructed it. That's not a bad thing, these days scientists have to know everything about everything. Sometimes it's ok to let mysteries remain as such.

Next, we traveled another 1.5 hours to Bath, England. Here, there were street performers that got up one after another each lasting for about five minutes. At one point, there was an old guy in a tu-tu on at 15 ft. tall unicycle juggling flaming batons. We were separated into groups and went on a tour of the town. This was pretty interesting. Some of the larger buildings had the stereotypical European Gothic, opulent architecture. However, the all housing in the town was built in a Georgian architecture, named after several King George's in a row. Now this architecture really fit in with my obsessive compulsive tendencies. It is really plain. All the houses are the same color in the entire town and they don't have roofs, they are flat on top. They have nothing but windows, and the windows are symmetrically placed on each side of the door. The windows are square with the square lattice. There are no outcroppings, plantholders, or decorative etchings. The entire town is townhouses that are connected and each section takes up a whole city block. There are no free standing buildings. Look down a road to see it surrounded by three story high, continuous building as far as the eye can see. This also means that you don't get much sunlight unless the sun in directly overhead because it is blocked by the buildings.

Much of Bath's architecture has not been altered from its original state. A builder was hired to construct a city block of house faces. Then people bought one, and hired their own builder to actually construct the house behind, so not one of the townhouses has the same architecture inside. Also, our tour guide told us something interesting. He said that at one point (the British royalty are famous for trying to fill up the treasury using stupid taxes) there was a "Window Tax." Windows that were less than 12 inches apart counted as 1 window. Since no one wanted to pay the window tax, the rich had their windows moved closer together so they were only charged once for a pair of windows. We could see that on the faces of the houses, where the old window was filled in with brick and the new window was placed. But those who weren't rich just had all but 1 window filled in with brick. You could also see this shoddy craftsmanship. All the townhouses are constructed from large squares of some kind of stone. Apparently all the soot from coal which was burned long ago made the stone turn black. At one point, the city government paid to have every inch of every house, not powerwashed, but scrubbed with toothbrushes. They left a few things unscrubbed as an example. In these areas the stone was blacker than black, while the original color of the stone is a light tan. While walking through town, a lady was running up to people, shaking her Bible in their face and yelling fire and brimstone verses. I was laughing because a man at San Jose State does the exact same thing. As our tour guide said, "There are crazy people everywhere." There is so much more I could type about the little intricacies of Bath, but my fingers tire. If you are interested, you can look it up, Bath's history is very intriguing.

Then we went for our tour of the Roman Baths. I had heard so much about Bath from those that have traveled to England previously. Guess what? They exagerated! The most interesting thing was the one bath that was still standing in its entirety. It had an upper walkway that looked down into the bath, then you traveled down the stairs and it was basically a pool with an open top. The audio tour said that the sick would travel there because they thought the water was healing. It didn't sound very healing to me, to get in hot water filled with leppers and chronically ill people. Sounds more like germ soup, left to perculate at the perfect temperature to multiply diseases. In actuality the water is really hot and with modern technology, it is chlorinated and cooled now before people can touch it. Theoretically, the original structure consisted of several baths, some above ground, some smaller, underground. They had some paintings of artists impressions of the baths and it looked like the Grotto at the Playboy mansion to me. A bunch of busty, naked women in an intimate, underground hot tub? However, outside of that one bath, the rest of the tour was basically a museum. You'll see in some of my pictures that there were stone carvings that took up several bricks, and those still intact only composed 20% of the picture. The rest, archaeologists had just drawn. I realize that the Roman Baths are cool because they were constructed before England was even England, but seeing bits of rock out of place isn't that interesting to me. I could see that in a text book. I wanted to see 3-D objects still nearly in their original form. We quickly finished the tour and hung out at a coffee shop until the bus was ready to leave. We rode the pus Roman history is some of the oldest history that actually has decent records. It's not that I'm not interested in Roman history, I'm just looking forward to seeing a lot more of it in it's original form when we travel to Rome in April!

Otherwise, I'm just thinking about my essays due in over a month, but I'm going to finish them by the end of this week so I can have my teachers look over them. The reason is two-fold, firstly, I don't know how they do citations here and formatting, and secondly, I don't know if my teachers are going to dock me points for not spelling penalized as "penalised" and other grammatical differences between England English and American English.