Books and Tea

Trip to Scotland, Days 7 and 8: Glasgow All Over

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Christina

We spent yesterday travelling around the Western end of Glasgow, visiting everything we possibly could. In order:

  • The Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum
  • The Hunterian Museum
  • The Hunterian Zoology Museum
  • The Hunterian Art Gallery
  • The Glasgow Botanical Gardens

The Hunterian venues are all clustered together within the University of Glasgow, so we saw a good chunk of that too.

I took a truly ridiculous number of photos yesterday, and trying to upload and caption them all would get boring pretty fast. So I’m just going to stick to the highlights below.

The entrance to the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum. A very dignified, imposing edifice.
The central hallway of the Kelvingrove. This photo doesn’t really do justice to the scale of vaulting ceiling.
This sculpture, “Memorial to a Marriage” by Patricia Cronin, is a duplicate of a similar sculpture she’s placed over her and her partner’s burial plot. They are emphatically not roommates.
They had a Van Gogh in their collection! I watched “Loving Vincent” on the flight over from Toronto, which added to the poignancy of this. I highly recommend it, not only for its artistic and technical merits, but for the structure of the script and storytelling.
This is a portrait of ballerina Anna Pavlova painted by one of the Scottish Colourists. I love both the neon-ish glare of the lights and Palova’s pose of gleeful abandon, emphasized by the glowing orange shawl.
This is part of the passageway leading to the Hunterian Museum within the University of Glasgow. These marvellous stone columns and arches made me feel like I was in Dwarrowdelf.
The entrance to the Hunterian Museum itself.  It contains a number of ancient Roman artifacts recovered from the Antonine Wall, just north of Glasgow.
This is one such ancient Roman artifact, a stone altar to Jupiter and Victory.
This is one of the best-preserved coins in existence showing Cleopatra’s face.
Moving on to the Hunterian Gallery — I got to see a Van Gogh and an Alphonse Mucha print on the same day?!
Curators speculate that this portrait of a woman holding a parrot is part of a matching set, with the other portrait being that of her husband. However, the other painting is all the way over in the Netherlands.
This is the single largest painting in the entire Hunterian collection, and it’s of Hector bidding farewell to Andromache and Astynax before going off to face Achilles. I felt chills once I realized the subject matter, because it’s one of the most heartbreaking parts of The Iliad.
This is the entrance to the Kibble Palace, a giant greenhouse within the Glasgow Botanical Gardens. The statue is of Eve.
An orchid within the orchid house. There are several greenhouses devoted to tropical and subtropical plants, such as orchids, succulents, and carnivorous plants.

We ended yesterday by taking the Glasgow Subway back to St Enoch station; at the risk of sounding condescending, their subway system is adorable. It’s got only 15 stations! It’s just a single circular loop! The subway cars are so short and round that my husband can’t even stand up fully in them! It’s so clean and functional and not riddled with systematic neglect and underfunding! I felt the same sort of jealousy as when I visited my sister in Montreal a few years ago.

We had dinner at the same restaurant that we ate at during our first night in Glasgow last week. I had the Cullen Skink again, and followed it up with an authentic plate of haggis, neeps and tatties. We shared a dish of Cranachan (similar to a trifle) for dessert.

Haggis, neeps and tatties with a whiskey cream sauce.
Cranachan, made with cream, whiskey, oats and raspberries.

We easily walked 13 km yesterday, so today was lower-key and mostly focused on shopping and seeing new streets. I bought some whisky as a gift for a friend. We walked down Sauchiehall, which is a glorious pedestrian-only thoroughfare with lots of public seating. We also saw the bagpipe museum, but we couldn’t stay for long because a private tour group was was going to be coming soon after we did.

Tomorrow promises to be long and busy, as we’ll be taking another day trip to Edinburgh and seeing zoos both metaphorical (the Fringe) and literal (the actual Edinburgh Zoo, home of Haggis the baby pygmy hippo). Wish us luck!

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