Very old things are a part of everyday life here in German. Very, very old. Last weekend we visited the ruins of a Roman Villa. The ruins are as old as 130 AD (they think). That is old, old, old.
This is a scale model of how they believed the ruins looked. I tried to label everything.
My favorite part was the bath area (probably because that is where you could see the most). There was a changing area and three bathing rooms each with a different temperature – a warm bath (#3 below), a lukewarm bath (#2), and a cold bath (not shown). They had a water heating system that allowed the water to flow from one bath to the next (from the warm bath to the cold one). The water then flowed to the toilet (#8). The white stuff you see dusting some the the stone in the picture is snow. Yup, there was a little bit of snow there… it was cold. It is hard to see from the picture, but #9 is where the water flowed out of the bath area – out and away to some location unknown to me.
This is a picture of us. We are standing in front of the toilet because my camera battery was about to run out and I didn’t have time for us to move somewhere else.
Robin is taking a look over the ruins.
This pillar had religious significance in this villa. It was a Jupiter Pillar and stood about 10 meters tall (about 30 feet). From what I read, this pillar was a mixture of Roman-Celtic worship that was often practiced in the the Northwest Roman provinces.
Here is what is left of the main building. The walls are about 2 feet high. They seem to have had a heating system in this building as well. The water was heating in a small “room” just outside the building. A slave or other servant kept a fire going there when the head was needed (a really good picture of this can be found on the website here - http://www.haselburg.de/rundgang.html#haupt). The heat went under the floor and also through the bricks in the wall creating what was probably a pleasant temperature.
This site is about 14 km (about 9 miles) from where we live therefore, it belongs to the category of every day life.
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