Bradford, Bath, and Beyond

I'm happy to say that, at least for the time being, I have the Internet in my house again. I get the sense that this may be a recurring issue, though, and if you find I'm not updating this journal for a couple of days in a row, that's probably why. That or I'm busy with homework, which is beginning to ramp up fairly significantly, though it's got nothing on a Chicago workload yet. I've written up my weekend escapades as best I can, and have tried to be a little more diligent about proofreading than I have for past entries. Enjoy!

15 October 2005

If you are ever feeling a bit down and happen to be in the area, take a trip to Bradford-on-Avon, and you will feel better. I suppose that it’s fair to say that Friday was not the happiest day I’ve had here, so I earmarked Saturday for a trip, always a sure-fire way to cheer me up. It was sheer serendipity that brought me to Bradford, though. My original intent that morning had been to go to Chepstow and Tintern Abbey in the southeastern corner of Wales. However, I missed the bus by a few minutes (admittedly that was all my fault; I got caught up in playing mahjong after I woke up, and time just slipped away), so I went with Plan B. Plan B was, appropriately enough, to catch the train to Bath. I went and bought my ticket (so cheap it’s hard to believe; my whole days travels cost me all of £5) and then found out to my chagrin that the track was being worked on to the southeast of Bristol, meaning that all rail service in the area was now bus service. English buses, it turns out, are nowhere near as fast, comfortable, or spacious as English trains, and when we got to Bath (still only a half-hour trip, I should say) the prospect of spending all day in a big, tourist-ridden city didn’t really appeal to me. I saw that there was a bus about to leave for Bradford-on-Avon, which I had heard had a very nice Saxon church, so I hopped on for an afternoon in the countryside.
Bradford-on-Avon (don’t confuse it with Stratford, it’s much more famous – and consequently more crowded – cousin upstream) is the only place so far where I’ve been able to get out into rural England, and maybe that colored my impression of it more than I realize. Perhaps every town in England is that gorgeous, but I doubt it. It simply has everything going for it. It’s on the River Avon, as the name implies (it is, in fact the “broad ford” over the Avon), which meanders slowly through the town as picturesquely as possible. The people all seemed very friendly, especially the nice elderly woman in the Tourist Information Centre who told me my accent sounded much more Canadian than American, which I’m sure was meant in a positive way. There are lots of green spaces, all very well kept-up; in fact, the whole southwest corner of the town is basically one big park. It’s the buildings, though, that really make it such a nice place, especially on a sunny fall day. Pretty much everything is built out of a honey-colored stone (a sandstone, I believe; the salient point is that it’s the same kind of rock in which so many of England’s famous Jurassic fossils are found, on top of which it looks really good as a building material). There’s not many sights to see per se – I saw all the main ones comfortably in two hours – but walking around and taking it all in is a great experience. There’s an old bridge over the Avon (with an old chapel/jail cell sticking off the side), the old market street (now the only really touristy part of town), the Tory neighborhood (a fascinating place on the hill – or tor, hence the name – overlooking the town; there are no roads, just pathways and stairs that practically take you through peoples’ yards), the Church of St. Laurence (allegedly the finest example of Saxon architecture in the country, and possibly as old as the 700s, depending on who you believe), the much newer Holy Trinity Church, and a massive tithe barn along the Kennet & Avon Canal. The canal itself was quite a sight, absolutely packed with long and colorful canal boats. I made two loops of Bradford before the next bus back to Bath left, and I’m very glad I made the trip.
It was only a bit past three when I arrived back in Bath, so I decided to see the main sights now that the crowds had died down a bit. Only a bit, though: I’m fairly certain that there is no down time in Bath. For the first hour or so, there was a rugby game going on (a fairly good one, by the sounds of it) that you could hear from pretty much any part of the city. It was a little odd in such a tourist Mecca to run across people actually living there and doing things like going to games the same way those of us living in normal cities do. Bath, you see, is no normal city. It’s the site of the only natural hot springs in Britain, so the wealthy and powerful have gone there to relax at least as far back as Roman times. Actually, the Romans did more than just relax: they made it into one of the most important cities in the northern Empire. I gritted my teeth and paid the exorbitant fee to visit the old Roman baths, and in the end it turned out to be a decent investment. To make sure I got my money’s worth, I actually used the audio guide that was included in the admission. I usually scoff at the things, preferring to travel through exhibits at my own breakneck pace, but in this case I learned a lot more than I would have from the meager signage (For instance, did you know that in this, one of the holiest spots outside of Rome, some of the most commonly found religious “offerings” were actually curses? People were vindictive way back then, too!). The ruins themselves are really very spectacular as well; if nothing else, the Romans were pros at building on a grand scale. Sadly, I just missed being able to try some of the spa water, as the café with the fountain in it closed before I got to that part of the tour (for those of you who haven’t had honest-to-God spa water, it’s some of the most revolting stuff you’ll ever taste, but I always feel compelled to try). The other big thing Bath has going for it, and the reason so many tourists flock to it, is its architecture. The main building material is the same stone as in Bradford, but in Bath everything is bigger and more posh. As you walk around the city, you see nothing but row upon row of some of the most overwrought buildings you’ll ever see. Incidentally, for those of you who know much about Bath, it’s true what they say: in the right afternoon light – which I was fortunate enough to have – the buildings really do glow. I saw the buildings my Blue Guide starred as being especially nice (they were) and headed back to the station by way of William Herschel’s house, the building from which the astronomer discovered the planet Uranus. The bus ride back was enlivened by the presence of a crowd of rugby fans torn between happiness at their team winning and anger that they might miss their connection in Bristol. They were, of course, fairly profoundly drunk, so you can imagine the entertainment value for the rest of us.
My mood soured a bit when I got home and found out that our Internet was inexplicably not working again. Fortunately, I had something better to do: dinner at Neil’s place. I haven’t had cause to mention Neil just yet, but he deserves some mention here. He’s a postdoc, and the reason I haven’t had much to do with him yet is because his area of specialty is micropaleontology, not my particular favorite field. Don’t get me wrong: micropaleontology is arguably the most important single facet of paleontology, if for no other reason than your sample sizes are large enough to actually be able to do statistics. I tip my hat to those that choose it a career, but there’s no way I could ever have the patience to do so myself. At any rate, Neil is not at all the basket case you might expect from someone who studies dead plankton for a living. Rather, he’s a very bright (obviously, having a PhD and all) and outgoing guy with an appreciation of movie soundtracks and funny accents. He had several of us over for drinks and pizza, after which we popped in a DVD. There are not many things that people from all over the world can sit around and talk about as equals, but we found one of them: the language of Star Wars is universal.

16 October 2005

Today was, as I expect will be the case with many Sundays from here on out, a day to get things done. I let myself sleep in and have a relaxing morning, but the afternoon was devoted to room cleaning, laundry, and studying. My big project at the moment is a 500 word paper on trace fossil taxonomy. Five hundred words may not sound like much, but research for it has been a pain. Even to most paleontologists, the naming of trace fossils is an obscure subdiscipline. To give you all an idea of what I get to work on here, I’ll explain, and hopefully in doing so I will give myself a few ideas for the paper. A trace fossil is basically any evidence of past life that isn’t part of an organism itself (trackways and burrows being the best known). Since they often can’t be correlated with a specific organism, they are assigned their own genus and species names, known as an ichnotaxon. However, despite the best efforts of researchers over the years, there’s no hard-and-fast system for naming trace fossils. In fact, there are many fossils which some consider to be trace and others consider not to be trace (eggs and cocoons, for example). On top of that, many ichnologists use modern traces as the basis for naming an ichnotaxon, which has many other researchers up in arms. It all gets very arcane and confusing, and there is next to nothing about it in the literature, making it a difficult thing to study. I desperately look forward to next week, when our “Controversies” class moves on to feathered dinosaurs, something I actually know a thing or two about.