Disclaimer:  I am no Shakespeare, hopefully the pretty pictures will make up for the mediocre writing.

Greetings from Bath,

To my family and friends, welcome, I've missed you.  And to anyone who happens to stumble upon this page welcome also.  I am a New Zealander studying civil engineering on a university exchange to the lovely city of Bath, England for five months.

To start with, I arrived at Heathrow airport at the very uncivilised hour of 6am, on Wednesday the 29th January, and traveled straight into Bath. I spent my first few hours here wandering the streets, discovering little bits of beauty, and utterly lost.  The architecture is absolutely amazing, everything has the same old world feel, even the new buildings.  I guess it is what I have imagined as quintessentially British.

On top of it, everyone has been exceptionally friendly, which makes it easy to forgive them for thinking I'm Australian.  Its a good thing that the locals are willing to help because this is a city missing street signs.  Most of the streets are indicated by an etching into the corner building, but these are definitely not at frequent intervals.  As I tend to get lost even with a map under my nose, this is a slight problem.  I can't feel bad about it though, Bath is a place I think anyone would be happy to be lost in.

On Friday I had my first trip to the university which is more modern than the city, and sports some impressive student spaces.  Coming from the University of Canterbury that lost its Student Union Building in the earthquakes, this is quite exciting.  They also tell me that the sporting facilities are used by Olympic athletes for training, so I'm duly impressed.

This has turned out longer than planned, so here are the promised pictures.

This is a portion of The Circus.  I found it completely by accident my first day here.

These are the details on the lamp-posts around the Circus and the Crescent.  I expect they have some significance which is lost on me at present.

This is the river Avon, not really comparable to home.

Bath Abbey.

And who would have thought? An obelisk in the middle of Bath!

What was New Zealand doing in 1174??