I went on the London Eye today. Mum didn't want to come - she was too scared - so I just went on my own. I don't know why she was scared, it was actually quite boring as far as "rides" go. You're in this giant bubble, essentially, with up to 25 other people, and it just turns around really slowly (28 minutes per revolution, or thereabouts). And it doesn't stop to let you on or off, it turns so slowly that the people get off, these guys with detectors on sticks come in and look for explosives under the seat (and a girl goes around with a broom to pick up the rubbish), then everybody piles in - all while the capsule is still going around.

If the weather was a bit clearer than the day I went, you'd probably end up with a much better view, but I could still see quite a far way. In fact, the view up the river was still pretty good.

I was on a bus tour around London as well, so I saw all the major places, Trafalgar Square, the Marble Arch, Buckingham Palace (the queen was in residece, but I never saw her...), St. Paul's Cathegral, Westminster Abbey, etc, etc. It was good, but it really depends on your speaker. I got off a couple of times, with a different speaker each time. Only one of them was really decent - when you find a good one, you tend to stay on the bus much longer. When you have a crappy one, you tend to get off at more stops. So I guess it's not bad either way :)

I met my mate Jeff for drinks tonight as well, so that was good. He moved to London about 5 months ago, so it was good to catch up. He seems to really like it here. After all, this is a great launching point for traveling around Europe - if that's what floats you boat.

The place we stayed in last night was a tiny little village near Stroub. It's in the Cotswolds, which is regarded as one of the most beautiful places in England. I can kind of see why, in this village. The houses are all very old stone buildings, with lush, green gardens all around. The stones are moss-covered, and the lanes are these charming little one-car-wide deals which provide a lovely atmosphere. Unfortunately, the lanes all take form much over function, and if you happen to meet a car coming the other way, more often then not one of you has to reverse back to somewhere you can pull into a little nook and let the other car pass. You'd also have a lot of trouble getting a car much bigger than our Ford Mondeo through (4WD owners, I'm looking at you). I saw one E-Class Mercedes parked in a driveway, and I thought it was a brave person who drove that!

Anyway, today we arrived in London, checked into the hotel and gave the car back. London is almost exactly like I imagined it would be. In fact, it reminded me so much of the game "The Getaway" on PS2, that I almost felt I knew my way around already!

I wasn't really in the mood for doing too much today, so I spend a fair amount of time this afternoon in the hotel room just taking it easy. Tomorrow, I'll probably buy one of the bus tour tickets (which lates two days) and take a tour around. Maybe see the Eye of London or something like that - just depends where I decide to get off the bus, I guess.

The guy at the Old School House said he'd do our washing for us - free of charge! How nice? So we left our washing there, to be picked up in the evening before heading to the new place (which, like I mentioned yesterday, is just across the way a bit).

We went to the town of Bath today, so see the roman baths. They have this big museum and you can actually go around the baths and see all the different layers of construction. The original stonework and the baths themselves were constructed by the Romans around 2,000 years ago. It's quite amazing that some of the mechanisms they built 2,000 years ago still work today (for example, the water level in the bath is controlled by a sluice which was built by the Romans and still works today!).

The water for the baths was originally rain which fell some 10,000 years ago and seaped into the Earth's core. It was heated by the natural temperature of the Earth, and as it heated, it rises back to the surface following the fault line which is underneath the town of Bath. When it reaches the surface, the water is some 47°C - all year 'round. You get around 1.17 million litres of water pumped up from the Earth's core every day. Most of it goes straight into the river, but some of it goes into the Baths that the Romans built.

When the Romans conqured Brittain around 100AD, they discovered the water seaps around Bath. The natives held the area as sacred, and they told the Romans that their god Sulis looked over the place. The Romans asked them who Sulis was, and they were told that Sulis was the native's god of wisdom and healing. The Romans, being the pragmatists they were (and having stolen most of their gods from the greeks anyway, didn't think much of pinching this one, too) said "oh, that sounds like our god Minerva" so from that point on, Sulis and Minerva were counted as one and the same to the Romans. In fact, a lot of the carvings mention "Sulis Minerva" - both names together.

When the Romans built their baths, the baths themselves had an enormous domed roof over the water, and plenty of temples and altars for sacrificing to the gods. After their empire ended around 400AD, the baths were pretty much abandoned, and the roof eventually collapsed. Eventually, people returned to the area, and in the 18th century, the baths were rebuilt on top of the roman ruins. This time, with no roof, but instead a big viewing platform around the top.

People would come from all over Brittain to the Baths, for their healing power. But of course, having a bunch of sweaty and often sick people together in the one body of water is not really all that healing, and in fact many more people would have gotten sick than would have been healed! Nevertheless, people flocked from all around. And even Queen Victoria came. She suffered from the Gout, and she drank copious amounts of water from the springs (drinking the water and swimming in it gave you a double benefit, of course, because then you have the water both inside and outside!) It didn't do a thing for her gout, but it did wonders for Bath (once the Queen goes, suddenly it's very fashionable) and Bath the city was pretty much rebuilt from scratch. The street level was raise some 18 feet, to keep it above the marshy bogs around the spring, and all nice new building were built. You can see evidence of the raising of the street level where some building were not demolished - their "ground" floor is actually one level below street level!

One funny thing I noticed about Bath is that a lot of the building have the toilet built as little wooden boxes outside the main building, up a level or two, which seems to imply that the original buildings never had a toilet. I could not understand why that was though... you can see in the picture that the toilet is the black box hanging off the building.

You could buy a glass of the bath water to drink for 50p, which I did. It's supposed to have "healing powers", but I seemed to have a bit of a queazy stomach after I got home today. I don't know if it was because of the water or not. It had a very lime-y taste. Kind of like drinking water that's had a bunch of rushy nails soaking in it. They signs posted around the actual baths saying "this water has not been treated and so is not safe for drinking or even touching" so they must do something to ensure it won't kill me!

It's a big day tomorrow! We're heading off to London for the final leg of the holiday. I'll be so releaved to have a hotel to go back to each night, instead of staying in a different place every day! It's been quite an experience, but I don't think I could stand doing it for more than the week or so we've been doing it now. I think the hardest thing is not knowing where we're going to be sleep from day to day. But I'm looking forward to getting back into a big city. We'll be taking the car back, too, so it'll be the buses and underground for me, I think!

We're in a small village called Frampton on Severn. A lot of villages in the Cotswolds have names like "something on somthing", where they name not only the town but also the river the town is on. So Frampton on Severn is on the river Severn. It was another long drive out of nothern Wales to here, so we didn't get much time to do anything really. We're staying in a little house called "The Old School House", and they've got chickens and horses and stuff... it's quite a nice little farm, actually.

We visited a little castle called the Sudeley Castle. It had some amazing gardens and the like. Note the ancient guard house, complete with original satellite dish, to keep the guards happy (though a little distracted, perhaps) while guarding the gate. There's people living in the castle - the Lord and Lady something-or-other - so we couldn't actually go in (imagine living in a castle! It'd probably be a bit draughy though) but we had a wander around the gardens there, and they had a bit of a bird aivery where we could see different kinds of water fowl and the like. You can see mum in the distance of the picture above, waving at us. This is only a tiny part of the garden, there were lots of hedges and topairy and it was all very well looked after. Ahh, to be rich! And called "Lord"!

Tomorrow we're staying just acorss the way a bit in Stroub, so we'll be going to Bath for the day. That'll be interesting, to see the Roman Baths and all that.

We took a slight detour today into Wales. Mostly just so we can tell people we've been to all of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales :)

It was a lot of driving, and we arrived here around 4pm. I was pretty zonked out, so I just hung out in the room (really soft bed!) until dinner, then went to sleep after that... Hopefully will be a little more into thing tomorrow! I believe we'll be heading over to the Cotswold tomorrow, where we'll spend two nights, then one night outside London, then we're booked in for five days in London before flying home!

One thing I've noticed about Wales is that all the road signs are in both English and Welsh, as well as a lot of the normal signs. I learnt that "aran" is Welsh for "slow" :) But Welsh is quite a difficult language - lots of consonants all strung together. For example, dinner tonight I had "Chwiski Salmon" (I think that's how it was spelled). The "Chw" is kind of like the English "wh" but with a sort of gurgling sound in the back of your throat... or something.