Bath and the English kittie

Greetings everyone! This is Scott logged in as Barbara by the way. Sorry we haven't posted in a couple of weeks, we will try not to make a habit of that. So what can you tell by the title of this post? Perhaps we've been attempted to bathe English cats? Not quite, these are in fact two completely unrelated topics that have happened since our last post. One, we visited the old roman town of Bath, and two, we successfully navigated the red tape and imported our beloved cat Sue!!! That's right, Sue is with us now and in good spirits. She's sitting in Barb's lap right now trying not to fall asleep. Thank you very much to Barb's folks for taking care of Sue for us the last month and a half. Sue says: "thnx fur feedin adn petting me, kbai".

So Barbara and I saw Bath! You may have heard of it before, it was originally found by the Romans (or at least recorded as being found by the Romans, they had a habit of deciding to start history from scratch sometimes) and is the only hot spring in the British isles. The used this hot water to create a pool and they...worshipped it! They actually built a temple over the area and made sacrifices to the goddess of wisdom and decisions, Sulis Minerva. The crafty little Romans used the hot water from the spring and piped it to surrounding rooms and pools. Bathing was a very important social event for Romans (I can just see the English Victorians cringing) so they really liked it I'm sure when it was steaming hot! So anyway, the baths were neat. Right next door is Bath Abbey which is also very cool. They say it is quite possible that another Roman temple exists in this area and that it most likely lies beneath Bath Abbey. It's another very awesome medieval church just like you see everywhere here. Bath is quite unique, almost all of the rest of its architecture is Georgian (English for neoclassical), and the town is protected so that you can't built anything modern in the city center. We've posted the pictures on Flickr.

On another note, last Sunday Barb and I met up with Fei Song in Reading. Fei went to graduate school with me at the Walton College. She happens to have moved over here a couple months before us to Bracknell which is town very close by. We hung out and talked with Fei for a couple of hours at a pub, it was fun. Another MBA classmate, Jamie Lanius, will be moving to London quite soon also. Hopefully we'll meet up with her sometime soon. Also I'm been in contact with David Deitz, a friend of mine from undergrad, who's been living in Leeds now for a while. He and his wife are moving to London in a couple of months so we plan on seeing them as well. Small world.

Barbara and I just had a very relaxing Saturday. We only left the house to go to the grocery store and pick up picnic items. We then proceeded to ride our bikes to a spot on the Thames and have a picnic. It was a lovely day in the 70s (I'm sure this temperature does not seem fair to those we know in Arkansas and Texas) with lots of sun. We were in a park area outside the oldest church in town. Just to paint a picture for you all, we were sitting there eating a French baguette with blue cheese, French sausage, and watercress and drinking a bottle of red wine while watching the swans swim by. Aaahhh. Suuuch a hard life.

As a side note, Barbara would like to add that she found out a piece of trivia about our home. We live in Caversham which is our nice little suburb of Reading. Barb found out that Caversham is the oldest known permanent settlement in Britain! Wow, I had no idea! Barb also wanted me to say that the bobbies actually do look like the guys on Hot Fuzz! Wow, thanks Barbara! I'm sure everyone was wondering about that. Yarrrp!!!!