Walkabout

Eventually, here, we’ll be getting our heads above water long enough to look around and say, “Hey! We’re here!” and start to celebrate it. We’ll look back at these bewildering days of feeling stumbly and silly and find tolerant smiles. Helping us look forward to settling in (God haste the day) has been the little list of Outings we’ve been accumulating. If you know of other exciting places we should visit, do tell!

Glasgow University: It’s gorgeous, just the tiny sliver of it that we’ve seen. There is an art museum and a few other places of note, plus just looking at the architecture is a treat. We’ll definitely be hanging out there quite a bit!

Just a few blocks away from the ‘Uni’ is the huge and gorgeous Kelvingrove Art Gallery & Museum. People, it is massive – as you can see from the photograph above,
looks like a cathedral, is stuffed full of artistic goodness, and it. Is. FREE. I expect to live there. Kelvingrove Park is around it — full of sudden turns where you discover statuary and clumps of bright flowers. It’s so big we haven’t been through all of it yet — but just give us a couple of dry days, and we’ll be there! (*Photographs © 2006-07 by Stara Blazkova*)

Caithness Glass: Back in the JC days, D. was a bit of a dabbler in arts of all kinds. One of his favorite forms was glassblowing… so we’ve GOT to see this world-famous place, and maybe do a bit glassworking ourselves. Yes. I know what you’re thinking: when you leave, how much glassware do you want to wrap up to send home? I’ll be sure to make something heavy and crack proof… and very, very small…Also under this try-it-yourself-art heading will come a trip to Go Potty, a neat looking pottery studio. Unlike American places where you just tamely paint what ceramic someone else has poured, here you — throw pots. On a wheel. Yourself. Yes, of course D. shines at this. I think if he hadn’t decided to be a knitting-chef-Tech Boy type, he would have been an artist somewhere living in the woods, weaving things out of squirrel pelts. Well. There’s still time…

Matthew’s Foods: Yeah… it’s a store. But anyone who knows us well knows that we’re …weird. About food. (Hey. It’s not like we’re going to Ikea or anything here! Ahem, Van!) It’s kind of entertaining to us. We loved the Filipino market in Vallejo, with the tanks full of various edibles, the aisles piled with noodles, the durian paste… it’s like visiting the store in another country. At Matthew’s, we’ll be able to see myriad Asian countries. We also look forward to vising Roots & Fruits, a local green grocer who has gorgeous displays outside. We haven’t yet had time to stop, but we will…

I have to give credit to blog buddy Sara for this one — we have got to go to Kelburn Castle~! Why anyone is painting ‘graffiti’ on a castle might baffle you as it did me, but it’s only going to be there for two years. The plastering over the original brickwork is damaging them, so it is slated to be removed anyway, so the people involved decided to do something artistic with it before they tore it all down. It’s definitely …interesting, and will be a bright spot in the countryside.

We are disappointed not to be able to visit the National Museum of Rural Heritage right now, with the foot-and-mouth thing going on (something people probably have only heard a sentence about in the U.S., but it’s a big deal here, with all the farms around the city), but hopefully the quarantine will be finished in the spring. We hear the lambs are a hoot to watch – just as much fun as when we saw them at the sheepdog trials in Sonoma County.

There is so, so, so much more to see… as soon as we pull ourselves together a bit more, we’ll be ranging ’round, and take you with us. Oh! We are, apparently, going to Edinburgh in November, as D. has a conference to attend. THAT should be interesting. With my luck, there will be snow…

– D & T

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.