Mei Grows Tall

(july 26)

We hopped a train back to England at 7am, officially disembarking on our day trip to Bath. I saw the river Avon for the first time – sparkling and reflecting a cloudless sky and even a touch of midsummer heat. Just a touch. For the sake of time economy, here is a list of our pit stops:

• Victoria Art Gallery - Only 2 floors, two galleries, but nice. There was an exhibition on English landscapes through the ages.
• Jane Austen Centre – We bought tickets into the house (it was in the same area and restored to look like how she would have lived), listened to a talk, and poked around the museum on the ground floor. Mum wasn’t really into it, but I enjoyed the original movie costumes and film.
• Asian Art Museum – it was eh. Mum’s idea. There were nearly 10 flights of stairs and the inside was really stuffy and over heated.
• Antiques Centre - Mum is still in her antiquity craze. This building housed half a dozen independant dealers, and I saw everything from furniture to thimbles to old photographs.
• Roman Baths – My favorite spot! We spent nearly two hours inside taking photo’s, an excellent audio tour, and admiring Britan’s only natural hot spring. It was like taking a step back in time; hard to believe that that real people used that place and walked the same floors nearly 2000 years ago. There was a woman that kept walking into my mum’s pictures, and she got really steamed. Get it? Steamed?!

After all this, we caught dinner at Mai Tai, a wonderful Thai resturant, strolled through Parade Gardens, and caught the late train home. After reaching Cardiff an hour later, it was so late that a big section of the city centre was blocked off for Saturday night clubs and pubs. Basically, there were no buses. haha. So we walked three or four blocks away, caught the bus home and collapsed.