Bath Spa

I was in England, studying in the fall in Manchester, and I decided to take a trip to Bath Spa, in the southwest of England. It is about 5 hours by train, and I went because I have an affinity for Latin and Ancient Roman culture, and Bath was the center for ancient Roman Britannia.

It is famous for the natural spring of hot water that bubbles up every day, millions - literally millions - of liters of water surface every day, and the Romans thought the spring was a healing spring from the goddess Minerva, goddess of wisdom, so they built an elaborate temple to honor Her.

Anyways, I went there because I couldn’t afford to go to Italy, and it’s better than nothing, right? So I left on a Friday, alone, and was going for the weekend. But that is not the takeaway. Here goes:

I woke up early that day, and immediately set out for breakfast in the city center. There was a small little café you would expect to find in Europe, and I went in, and found that I was the only customer inside. I bought a bagel with cream cheese and a pot of Earl grey tea, and went to their upstairs where they had window seats looking out on one of the roundabouts in the city. It was only 7:30am, which is inhumanely early for me, but I think the time to sleep is when you’re home. Anyways, I sat upstairs, and enjoyed the best bagel of my life, and the best tea of my life, and thought to myself how nice it was to have three days without checking a computer for messages, or worrying about text messages, or checking e-mail or voice mail. I had a ‘moment of clarity’ a few days prior where I realized that despite my greatest efforts, my life centered around technology and information and seeking out information. Information, to me, was the key to insight and experience (which is why I felt the need to give the 101 History of Bath above). So sitting in the café and eating a bagel was probably the freest I had ever been. I had no timetable, no schedule, no technology, and frankly, no worries. You see, when I was walking around the small city of Bath, with its white sand-blasted stone buildings, Jane Austen museums, Abbeys, and cobblestone walkways, I felt as if I had been let off my leash, that I was free to wander the alleys and walkways like a stray dog. I felt emancipated from the constraints and goals I had put on myself; it was nice to experience something raw and real that wasn’t on a screen.

On my train ride home from Bath, after spending two days there, and venturing out to Stonehenge and a few smaller towns, I remember thinking how odd the weekend had been. Not odd in a weird, freak-you-out way, or even odd because of being in a new place; odd in the sense that I felt full. I felt like I had just lived. I wasn’t concerned about what needed to be done when I got home, or how much money I had, or whether I bought enough souvenirs, or what I was going to do with 5 hours to kill. It didn’t matter. The thing that mattered is that I did that - I did - and now, no one and no thing can ever take that from me; that for those collections of moments, I felt like birds do, like a river feels, like the wind.