The Yellow Town of Bath

Most people will tell you that Bath is a white town - these people include Jane Austen. And not racially speaking, literally, the place is (apparently) white because the rock used to build all of the buildings is a chalky white. Bath is famous for being a little too bright to walk around in during a sunny day.

In reality, these rocks are more of a yellow. It's like how you might be able to call manilla white, or it maybe looks like, if the rocks were white at one point, a herd of smokers has run by all of them and gotten nicotene stains on the whole town.

I don't mean to defame Bath. It's a wonderful place. More so than Exeter, I've come to believe. There's more to do in Bath than Exeter, there's more history in Bath, there's a quality theater (The Theatre Royal) in Bath.

Bath also boasts a thriving marketplace, a cool abbey (big enough to be a cathedral, but not the official home of a bishop, and so not one), a Christmas market (which I suspect has been taken down), a square in front of the abbey with tumblers, jesters, street amusers, etc., a river, a series of streets that are impossible to drive in, and enough cool restaurants to really make a night worth while.

The epitome of England, so far, actually, is walking through the central marketplace of Bath and hearing chimes humming some strange tune across the crowd from somewhere near the abbey courtyard. I don't even know what the instrument is called, but I'd call it chimes from my experience in bell choir.

http://images.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://www.whitechapelbellfoundry.co.uk/Handchime.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.whitechapelbellfoundry.co.uk/chime.htm&h=334&w=180&sz=34&hl=en&start=5&sig2=nZJ6DoZv3nvMhGGG867LVg&um=1&tbnid=pcwnhBicWPHDJM:&tbnh=119&tbnw=64&ei=8n5xR4-qNqKYxAHI7qTZDw&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dhand%2Bchimes%26svnum%3D10%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den

Sadly I haven't figured out how to do that cool thing Erin can do where she highlights the word "this" and it's the link to whatever it is. I'd be cool if I could do that.

But they sound like these instruments, except they're laid out on a board and you play them with an actual mallet.

In any case, THAT experience is England to me. So far.

Jane Austen spent a lot of time here, apparently, and there's a tea shop she used to frequent that I still haven't gone to. Then there are, of course, the Roman Baths, because the hot springs are still running. The mineral water is supposed to have healing properties, but no one knows what. For twenty pounds you can get in a pool of it. For less you can have a cup (un bathed in) to drink. I've tried neither.

What, pray tell, have I been doing in Bath then?

I've been at an internship at the Bath Theatre Royal, mentioned above, helping out their education department's youth theater organization, the Young Person's Theatre (YPT), as they were putting together a production of His Dark Materials with, get this, ~150 kids ages 12-19. It reminded me a lot of McCarter Theatre in Princeton, where I was in a bunch of the education department's programs - I consider it my stomping grounds now, although it's a little pretentious of me.

My internship consisted of hanging out with Katharine Lazare, the producer, and helping her out for half the day. Then the other half of the day I went with her compatriot Lee Lyford, the director of His Dark Materials, to help out the show. My first job, for instance, was to run around Bath and find cardboard boxes that a fellow intern, Kiki Stevens - a random American who goes to Hampshire that I met there - could help make into do-fer platforms for the kids to act on.

There are times like this when being in an internship is not unlike a sidequest in a collosal RPG like Final Fantasy VII. There's a lot of running around a charming but well-animated neighborhood, talking to some people who say random things over and over again, and others who can help you. Acquiring Key Items that you can only use in the quest, like "Cardboard Boxes" or "Tinfoil." Then bringing them back and using them to get sweet sweet XP.

But, back to real life. YPT was really a great experience, because it gave me a chance to get to see how one would take more complex dramatic theory stuff, like stuff from Kenyon, and use it effectively enough that an untrained amateur could understand it. Now, these kids had a serious will to be there, in fact, that's one thing that stood out most about it to me, was the willingness of all the kids to do their part, and their director's upmost respect for them, which they were completely conscious of.

I even got the chance to know a few of the kids I saw often, which was tough, because interns aren't supposed to talk, so surely most of them thought I was probably "that weird American guy who keeps watching us." Caitlyn, one of the girls playing Lyra, Joe, the guy playing Pantalaimon (sp?), and John, the guy playing Will, were some of the people I talked to regularly. I even got the chance to be dorky enough to show Joe and Caitlyn where "alethiometer" comes from, not just the Greek word for "truth," alethes, but what alethes means:

a - lethes
a: not (apolitical, amoral, etc.)
lethes: Lethe, the river of oblivion.
a - lethes = the Anti-Oblivion = Truth

I don't know many Greek pearls of wisdom, but that's one of them. Opens up huge new verandas of understanding not just within the context of His Dark Materials, but Socrates and the Bible as well.

Speaking of which, I got not one, but TWO intralinear Greek-English New Testaments for Christmas, one of which has a big old honking index in the back of Biblical Greek and words' definitions. Mmmm...

From Bath, on Thursday, I went straight to Bristol Airport, where I waited overnight for my plane to Geneva, but that is another story for another entry.

BUT

One final reason I love Bath:
Down the road from the Theatre Royal, literally the next block over, is a pub. And guess what that pub's name is?

The Griffin