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.