Wanderung 30

After breakfast we watched our ship sail up the bay that led into the river Clyde. We docked at Greenock at the mouth of the Clyde, and on the dock two bagpipers and a weird Scottish "mascot" greeted our arrival.

We have never actually stopped in Glasgow, so I was curious to see what it was like. Our ship excursion first followed the Clyde eastwards from Greenock, the major port area nowadays , to the western side of Glasgow proper. The shipyards that used to line the banks of the Clyde are mostly gone now, but the very first steamship, the Comet, had been preserved in a shore-side exhibit. Nearby was an artisitic monument to the shipbuilding industry that looked roughly like a ship's bow.

Our first stop was the Kelvingrove Art Gallery And Museum, which was a curious combination of a really nice art gallery on one side of an old building and a compact but very diverse museum on the other side. Our tour guide lead us around the art galleries, carefully explaining a few of the most important works. Our first stop was the work of an architect named MacIntosh, who was a modernist predating Frank Lloyd Wright. Curiously, he had the same compulsion that Wright did to not only design the exterior building but also the interior spaces and every stick of furniture or equipment that was used inside it. MacIntosh apparently influenced Wright, and some of the MacIntosh furniture looked remarkably like what I have seen in Wright houses.

I had not realized that Scottish artists also had an Impressionist period where the painted everyday scenes and people , usually on the spot. I have always liked the French Impressionists and I found I liked many of the Scottish Impressionist paintings also, particularly the brooding landscapes of the Highlands and some of the casual portraiture.

Over on the museum side we found exhibits ranging from a WWII Spitfire to an elephant! In between were many stuffed animals, some skeletons, and eggs from various birds including an ostrich and some extinct bird with an even larger egg! What an omelet THAT would make!

We ended our visit by listening to an organ recital played on the huge pipe organ dominating the upper rear part of the second story, roughly where a choir loft would be in a normal church. The organ was bigger than most church organs and the atrium of the museum was acoustically live, so we could hear every note. I enjoyed hearing secular music played on the organ, but I was also surprised how discordant the music sounded at times. I'm not sure why that was so; possibly overtones echoing oddly or lasting too long?

After the recital, we were driven to the central square of Glasgow, which has City Hall on one side, a Queen Victoria fountain in the center, and many statues of famous men decorated with bird poop scattered around the perimeter.

We were scheduled for an hour or so "on our own", so we stopped at a Subway for a quick and inexpensive lunch, and then strolled around the pedestrianized shopping areas on some adjacent major streets. We saw a store with a peacock out of wire, an old fashioned police box a la Dr. Who and a beautiful arcade. Many buildings had quite nice Georgian architecture and it was a sunny but cool day , so the walk was quite pleasant. We picked up some snacks at a "1-Pound" store, which is the same idea as a "Dollar Store" in the USA, and then strolled back to the square for our bus ride to our last stop.

Our final stop was the Glasgow Cathedral, which was the only Roman Catholic Church to survive the Reformation In Scotland. Apparently the Glaswegians had just finished building it when the Protestant army came through and the townspeople were prepared to defend it. To avoid a pitched battle, the army compromised by just removing all the "popish" ornamentation inside and converting it to a Protestant church.

The church was quite nice inside with wonderful Gothic arches and some more modern stained glass windows replacing the original Catholic-era ones. Underneath the main floor was a crypt-like area where our guide pointed out a "leper's glimpse" where leper's could take communion without facing the congregation, and a "little green man" which was a rather pagan style of gargoyle carved in an obscure part of the church's decoration. Fascinating.

Favorably impressed by Glasgow, we returned to Greenock where we got off the bus, but detoured into the Aldi just outside the port before getting back on board. There I found a bicycle tool kit for our upcoming bicycle tour, and Monika found local beer for roughly $3 a bottle, which she said was quite good. A bagpipe and drum group serenaded our ship as we backed off the dock with the weird Scottish Mascot still parading around. Our Captain backed spun the ship about, and we steamed slowly back down the estuary of the Clyde and out to sea with the setting sun in front of us.