Bath Time Stories

        Every day I'm so surprised by how much we can fit in in a day! We just read Sense and Sensibility for our English class, so this morning we took a coach to Chawton, which is where Jane Austen lived out the last few years of her life. We saw the church she went to, the estate her brother lived in, and the cottage where her and her mom and sister lived in. I bought Emma at the gift shop there, which is cool, cause she wrote it there! We watched a little video at her house about her life, and it mentioned her fling with Tom Lefroy! It made me so happy, but also a little sad, because I realized that the movie Becoming Jane is almost all fiction, and I love that movie!

       
        We went next to Stourhead Gardens, which are these gardens at the Stourhead estate (pretty complicated, I know). This is where they filmed the scene in Pride and Prejudice where Mr. Darcy proposes to Elizabeth and she turns him down! When we got to the pavilion where the scene was shot, we just started screaming because we were so excited! I feel like this was mostly a day for the girls in the program, because almost all of it was centered around Jane Austen. We took so many pictures around that pavilion, but it was hard not to, because it was SO beautiful! I know I say this every time, but really, I think this was the most beautiful place I've seen so far. It's so hard to capture it in pictures too! The hike around the lake made me feel like I was in a fairy tale or something, as cliche as that sounds. I finally got a picture put up! The internet is so slow that I only got one up, but hopefully you can see how pretty it is there. It's so green!
        Next stop after Stourhead was the city of Bath. Jane Austen lived with her family in Bath for a while, but she didn't like it at all. One of her books, (Persuasion, which I love!) is set in Bath. It's named Bath after all the Roman baths left there from when the Romans were in Britain; the Romans thought that the hot springs had healing powers. They've got a museum built up around the baths, so it was cool to see them. You can't go in them, but they do have clean bath water that you can drink. It sounds gross, because it is! It tasted like hot metal! Haha I had the hot cool-aid Julian Smith video going through my head the whole time. After exploring the baths, we went to this place called the Royal Crescent, which is a bunch of apartments built in the shape of a crescent. It's the biggest attraction in Bath besides the baths, but I wasn't really impressed by it. I did my presentation on the Royal Crescent in our prep class, and I though it was going to be a lot bigger. For dinner we ate at an Irish Pub, and it was really good! I just got a burger though, so nothing too exciting :) After that it was time to head back to the bus and then head back to the center. Today was another full day where I saw and did things that I've always wanted to! I'd say that today my horizons were widened :)