"I don't know what that Saxon fellow is doing there..."

Hi again.  So... of course after having posted that life was boring and that I wouldn't be posting for a while, stuff happened.  And while it still wasn't ground-shatteringly interesting, I still feel compelled to tell you about it.

I worked at home for most of the morning, and then made my way down to Nelson House to do work in the library.  On my way down, I decided to grab a bagel (it's a Friday tradition, after all).  And on my way from the bagel shop to Nelson House, who should I run into but...

THE ENTIRE BATH RUGBY TEAM.

Seriously.  I was just walking down the street and all of a sudden the lot of them poured out of a cafe and started walking towards me.  They weren't wearing their jerseys, but they all had matching shirts with the insignia, and they were all ENORMOUS, so I felt it safe to assume that they were, in fact, Bath Rugby.  Sadly, they are a bit less attractive (face-wise) close up, but you really get an appreciation for how massive these blokes are when you are walking through them.
(On another sad note, they lost their game today.  But on the bright side, I didn't pay for a ticket to sit in the rain and watch them lose...)

 Later on, since I was doing nothing but work and working always makes me hungry, I agreed to go with Clay to get a mid-afternoon snack.  We went to the uber-touristy Sally Lunn's Cafe, home of the Lunn Bun (I kid you not).  Sally Lunn came to Bath in 1650 ish or something, and invented this bun, which is something like a giant brioche hamburger bun, and it was a hit, and now she has a cafe named after her and tourists come and pay twice as much as they should to eat these things.  Anyway, I tried one-- toasted and buttered and spread with lemon curd and clotted cream and served with tea-- and it was good.  However, I think anything prepared in such a manner, including a plain piece of toast, would have tasted almost just as good-- but as a baker myself, I'm glad that I got to experience Bath's one bit of bakery-related history.

The coolest thing about the cafe was the tiny museum in the basement.  It was basically functioning as a gift shop, but it had a window into an excavation site that showed foundations from the Romans', the Saxons', the Medieval Monks', and Sally Lunn's residences in that building, which was pretty cool (the woman running the shop/museum was explaining this to us, and was pointing to the cute little cardboard cutouts of folks from each period which rested on their respective foundations, and noted, "I don't know what that Saxon fellow is doing there-- as far as I know, all they did was rape and pillage-- they didn't actually build anything.  Nasty brutes.").  Also, the kitchen in which Sally Lunn baked was preserved intact (behind another glass window) from 1650 ish, along with all of the tools used in the kitchen, and an oven dating all the way back to 1100 something!  Furthermore, to our great amusement, there was a lovely collection of stalactites and stalagmites growing in the doorway of the kitchen.

So then I did some more work, then went home and was unproductive.  But then I went out for dinner with my uncle's friend who lives in town (whom I had been trying to get together with since I arrived) and his wife at a lovely little restaurant/pub that's three minutes from my house that I didn't know existed.  We had a fantastic dinner (oh, the food was sooo good... such a nice change from mac and cheese and sandwiches), and a fabulous conversation-- they are a wonderful couple, and I really hope that I'll see them again soon.  They offered me their kitchen to bake in, which is incredibly exciting for me, and they seemed pretty excited about it too... so hopefully that works out.

I got home really late (it was a looong dinner), and sat with Clay for a bit while he skyped with some random people from Israel.  I attempted to speak a few words of Hebrew to them, and was told that I sounded like an eight year old, so I got indignant and only spoke English from then on.  It was probably for the best anyway, since I couldn't remember much more Hebrew than I had already said.

And now I'm off to bed.  Hopefully I'll get up early enough to go to the markets tomorrow morning, and then it's off to work for the rest of the weekend.  Woot woot.

Laila tov! (that's 'goodnight' in Hebrew, just so you know in case you don't want to sound like an eight year old in front of the next Israeli you have a conversation with.)