Tuesday, April 13, 2010

A day trip to Glasgow aka a shopping trip for a new ukulele

Yesterday I took a day trip to Glasgow.

I took the bus, about an hour and a half ride, but fortunately I had my knitting and an iPod with Aesop Fables in Spanish.

The first thing I did was walk a few blocks to the city chambers and took their free tour.
Glasgow City Chambers

Tiles

It's a very fancy building and a lot of it is built with marble.

Marble Staircase

The tour included sitting in the council chambers where they hold their city meetings.

And here I am sitting in the Lord Provost's chair.
Right in front of the chair is where the gold-plated silver "municipal mace" sits during their meetings. We didn't get to see the mace in person, but we did see the glow of light reflected from it through the glass door of the Lord Provost's room. I happen to think it's pretty cool that they have a scary and intimidating weapon in their government chambers.

After the tour I walked to Glasgow Cathedral.
Glasgow cathedral

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It never occurred to me that the church needs to be vacuumed frequently.
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And then to CC Music store, the actual reason why I took the day trip.
A new ukulele! I've been borrowing my brother's for the past few months, and it's a really cheap one. I haven't really been practicing on it much lately, it sounds that bad. So I bought my own! It's a Lanikai LU 21 soprano.

With my new uke in tow I went to the Kelvingrove Museum. It's a strange museum, aimed at children I'm assuming because the description posted next to their art, etc., is in very large type and written in simple words.
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Now most of the time when I need to catch a bus, train, or plane I get really paranoid about missing whatever I need to catch and get to the station with way too much time to spare. I decided that this time, since I didn't have that much time in the city anyway, that I'd try to get get there right on time. Well, of course I couldn't find the subway stop, just missed the subway and had to wait 6 minutes, then I had to walk many more blocks to the bus station from the subway than I had anticipated. In other words, I missed my bus. Fortunately they run frequently, and although the driver of the next bus grumbled, he didn't charge me extra.

In other words, it was a nice day.

3 comments:

  1. My husband is of Scottish ancestry (his gandfather and our three year old are named William Wallace - what can I say). Anyhow, every picture I've ever seen makes it look like such a beautiful place. We'd love to visit someday.

    Thank you for stopping by the blog, and good luck!

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  2. Welcom my home,Thea. Thanks for your comment about my doilies.
    Cheers.

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  3. Hi Erin, it is a lovely place, I hope you get to visit Scotland soon.

    Rosalia - thank you :)

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