The morning of 13th October, I got up at 4.30 – the earliest I’ve ever gotten up in London, took a hot shower, woke Ashish up, packed food and we were all set to go… to a place called the Bath. We reached the South Kensington Tube Station at 5.35 and missed the 5.34 first train to Paddington. The next one was only 11 minutes later and we were worried as we had to collect the train tickets and then get on to the train – all this without an idea of how the station was. Luckily, we got there at 6.11 and getting the tickets at the Fast tickets counter was very convenient and ‘fast’ indeed and after picking up the tickets, we were in the train with about 10 minutes to spare! It took us about an hour and a half to get to Bath. Sunrise wasn’t till 7.30 and when it did come up we could hardly see anything because there was dense fog. So, the purpose of taking a train was defeated. When we got off the train at 8 it was chilly and cloudy – we could barely even sit in the station and to think about it we still had an hour and a half before the Roman Baths opened. So, we picked up a hot coffee and tried to warm up. We went out of the station to a very deserted looking place and were wondering if anything would open up during the day. There was intermittent rainfall as we made our way to the Roman Baths. It was a small place with directions everywhere, and armed with a map (all thanks to Ashish’s intensive research) we made our way to the Roman Baths. We found a place to sit just next to the Bath Abbey where we sat down and had breakfast and slowly people started trickling in. by the time we were done with breakfast, there was another group of older people waiting to get in to the Baths. As we took a stroll around the place, saw some shops – all shut of course, we then came back and went into the Baths. This was a place built by the Romans originally in 2nd BC which was later destroyed by the Christians and then re-built again sometime during the 18th century. Armed with an audio tour guide it took us almost two hours to go around the place. First we had an aerial view of the Bath – this is a natural spring. The Romans would build such Baths around natural Springs and they would have a TempleBath. There are still ruins of the Temple and re-constructions of it to show how it might have looked. After the one and a half hour tour, we went into a gift shop and bought some souvenirs. When we got out of the place it was so amazingly crowded that we were left to wonder where all these people were in the morning!! There were a lot of entertainers on the streets as well. One of them was an opera singer with a great voice, yet another was a Irish band playing really lively music. We walked up to the Jane Austen Centre located at the house that the famous Novelist lived in. it has a tiny gift shop in the living room and the rest of the house has been converted into a museum. We then walked up to the Pulteney Bridge one of the two bridges in the world to have shops built on it. A gift shop immediately caught my eye and we walked into it. They had some miniature dolls which were absolutely cute and very real looking but equally rather highly over priced. They even had doll houses! I bought a couple of curios at a bargain and then we set off from there. Walking around some more, we came back to the Bath Abbey to have lunch where there were some more musicians singing and two girls playing a Cello. The Cello actually had a divine quality to its music. After relaxing for sometime, in which time the sun peaked out for about a couple of minutes, we again went out walking. This time another guy was entertaining a gathering in front of the Baths. We missed him riding the Unicycle but caught him doing a couple of more tricks and stunts that he kept regaling the crowd with. We next walked up to the Circle, which is a roundabout with residential houses all around which make up a circular form around the central roundabout. This leads up to the crescent where the residences are aligned in a crescent shape. Our next stop was the Museum of Costume which had rare old costumes in existence since the Victorian Age and some before that. The lighting is very dim in order to protect the texture and clothes. There is even a small section where one can try on the Corset as they were used in earlier times to get a feel of how they would dress up. The exhibition ends with the modern day costumes as well on display. There’s also a particular display of costumes worn by men in Ballets. When we got out from there it was four and we still had about four hours to go before our train back to London. It was quite cold and windy too but since we had the time we walked around the whole place, came across yet another Miniature shop and this time bought a small tea set. We walked back to the city center where we entered a Sports shop and bought a couple of T-shirts on sale. We then bought coffee at Caffe Nero and walked up to the Baths. By now everybody was going back and the deserted look that we’d seen in the morning was returning and this at only 5.30. We sat there and Ashish clicked away snaps of the Abbey by light and then we started our walk back to the train station with still a little short of two hours to go (considering that the train station was just a 5-minute walk. We came across a book store and went in there to browse, but didn’t find anything to buy. On our way back Ashish spent time clicking away photos in the night and we finally made our way back to the station. We still had to wait a while before the train came and we finally boarded our train back to London at 7.45. We now got seats opposite each other and there were two other ladies sitting next to us. They seemed uncomfortable just sitting next to us for a couple of minutes and decided to change seats. Worked well for us, we could sit next to each other now. Reached Paddington at 9.14, made a small stop for Fries that I wanted to eat the whole day and were home at 9.30! Totally exhausted of course!!
