Harry Potter...

I was poking around on the Internet yesterday and thought to myself how cool it would be if the next Harry Potter book came out while I was here. Then I could get a copy of the British edition of Harry Potter. So, I went to J.K. Rowling's website. I eventually found the 'news' section and found out that the next Harry Potter book will be the last! I was so bummed... but at least her site is tons of fun to look at.

Spain Here We Come!!

We just got back from booking our trip to Spain! We will be in Torremolinos, Costa del Sol, Spain for 7 days (December 17th - 24th) at an all inclusive resort. Its near Malaga and Sevilla, so side trips will be easy to do. We are both really excited and cannot wait to experince Spain.

Pollock County Park and The Burrell Collection

Today the International Student Advisor, Jim Wilson, set up an afternoon trip to Pollock County Park and the Burrell Collection. We took the train to the park since it is a 6 mile hike out of the city centre. Then we headed under a bridge and entered a huge park. You could not tell at all that the city surrounded it. The park is quite large -- there is a golf course, the Police training sites for the dogs and horses, the Pollock House, Highland Cattle and the Burrell Collection along with lots of walkways, gardens and open fields.
The Highland Cattle were definitely adorable. They are like the shaggy dog version of cows. I was excited to see them since who knows if we will be able to see them in the Highlands.
This isn't a spectacular picture, but this is where the Police dog training takes place.
The Pollock House -- This is a beautiful house that you can tour through, but right now its about $13 per person to get into the house, so we toured through the gardens. Come November, the admission to the house is free until March. We'll go back then. But the gardens were beautiful and worth the walk through.
Then we went to the Burrell Collection which is an amazing collection of art by one man. They only show 60% of the artwork in the collection and still in fact to this day cataloging it. Pretty amazing since it has been in the hands of the city since 1944 and the building that the collection is now housed in has been open since 1983. What is really interesting is that they are still collecting works of art. There is a trust set up to collect works every so often. Also amazing since there is no admission, but I imagine there are outside donors that help. We were able to see a very wide array of artwork spanning all continents and eras. We saw... tapestries, doorways, window arches, spoons, china, statues, trinkets, paintings, rugs, stained glass windows, pots, artifacts, clothing, fireplaces, rooms... I am sure I am missing something, but we saw a ton. I would include more pictures, but blogger has decided that this is my limit for day and no longer wants to upload them...

Our Week

Its hard to imagine that we have already been here for a month. We finally broke down and had cable internet installed yesterday afternoon. The library was getting too annoying. The wait for the computer was okay, but the incredible slowness was irritating. It got to the point that it would take an hour to check email and answer it. Its wonderful to have internet right at our fingertips again. This week I have been working at the Western Infirmary Hospital in their Occupational Health department. I work 4 days a week and 3 of them only half days. I really like the ladies that I work with AND we get a paid tea time! How great is that... every morning (and I imagine in the afternoons as well) we get about a 1/2 hour to sit and have a cup of tea and a snack. Works well with the eating every couple of hours way of life. Mike went on a mini-research trip this past Tuesday and Wednesday to London and Southampton for his end of the year thesis. He went down to their libraries to see what kinds of documents they had and if he would be able to use them. He is researching communication through letters into and out of during pre-World War II Germany. He was able to test his German skills, and of course he did great. He was able to read and understand most of the letters. Luckily for him the library in London had some of the collections all typed out so that he didn't have to decipher people's handwriting and only a handful of the letters had really sloppy handwriting. He didn't have anytime to do any touristy activities though because he spent all day in the library. We are going down for half a day on our way to Plymouth next month to see some friends, so expect pictures then! I am waiting for blogger to fix their bug with uploading pictures, and then I will have more to share.

Stirling Castle

Last Saturday, (the 14th of October) Mike and I packed a lunch and headed to the bus station to go to Stirling Castle. Its about a half an hour away by bus, so that wasn't bad. Stirling is a much smaller town than Glasgow and Edinburgh. We had our first "small" Scottish town experience and it was wonderful. There is a constant smell here in Glasgow because it is such a large city. Something between fresh baked bread (nice), other food cooking (also nice), stale beer and cigarettes, and old pee. Obvisouly the last three are not all that pleasant, but as drinking is a huge thing for the college students (obviously) and there is no smoking in bars so everyone smokes outside, and the drinking leads to males using the streets are their bathroom, and there of course is smog from all the traffic. I have even seen parents showing their small sons how to use the sides of buildings and cars as their own private urinal more than once, so I guess its just part of life here, but doesn't help the arroma. Anyway, it was nice to be able to breathe in fresh air.
The castle was beautiful and you could explore most parts of it. They have "modernized" some parts of it that they use for the Park Rangers offices and some of their military offices. But even with these parts off limits, it took us about 4 hours to complete our explorations of the castle grounds. We were able to take a tour of the castle and hear about quite a bit of history on the castle (I love these tours!). We were incredibly lucky and it was a wonderfully warm and sunny afternoon and the views from the castle were amazing. Here are some pictures of or day...

Here is the entrance to Stirling Castle.

Edinburgh

On Saturday, the 7th of October the International Director set up a trip to Edinburgh, which is the capital of Scotland. We went by train, which was beautiful. We were able to see a lot of the countryside and now have a couple more little cities that we would like to see before we leave. To answer Aunt Sue’s question from earlier, we are able to do all our side trips by bus, train or plane. Plane tickets here are quite cheap because of a price war going on.
As soon as we got there, the director walked us over the Holyrood Park and the Salibury Crags. We hiked about half way up and John Wilson told us all about the sights from there. The views were gorgeous from there… here are a few of them.

In the far background, you can make out Edinburgh Castle.

This is part of the crag that we hiked up. We don’t get to see beautiful rolling hills like this in Glasgow. Mike and I would have to take a bus to the outskirts to see them, so it was nice to be able to in a city.

This is Holyrood Palace. The Queen stays here when she visits Scotland. She has her own flag that she flies when she is there (she wasn’t this weekend). We could have toured the Palace and Abby, but it was £12. We decided that we would rather eat.
There were about 100 students that went on the trip, so we decided to split from the group, since they were just going to be doing a quick tour of the city and it was noon and there was still a long list before anyone planned on stopping to eat. We stayed on the Royal Mile this time, but have lots of plans for next time. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to Edinburgh until 11am and didn’t break off from the group until noon-ish, so we didn’t get to start seeing the city until about 1:30pm and then a lot of places started closing at 5pm. We were still able to see much of the Royal Mile and only have to hit a few more place on our next visit, on of the main places being Edinburgh Castle. You need most of the day to see it and we didn’t want to have to pay to see it twice, so decided to wait. Also I have added more pictures to Flickr. Some are from our trip, and some are from earlier.

These boys played beautifully. Nearly everyday we can hear bagpipes being played. Some play better than others, and these boys were up at the top of the list.

Clan Tartan and Crest

During our excursion to Edinburgh on Saturday, October 7th, we found out that the Rose and Anderson Families have a tartan and crest. We stumbled across the Anderson Family first, which I was really excited about. Both sides of my family have the name ‘Anderson’ and while I don’t think that either came from Scotland, they may have still have used the tartan. Mike tells me that the more colours that are in the tartan, the richer the family is. Well, there are tons of colours in the Anderson tartan, so I plan on looking up my long-lost rich relatives because I am sure that they would love to fund some of my travel wishes! We didn’t expect for the Rose’s to have a tartan and crest at all and were really excited when we stumbled across it. I plan on getting a scarf with this tartan now and we already bought a magnet. Below are links to the Anderson and Rose family information, if you click on the links on the left of the pages you can see the tartans and crests and more. The first sight has more tartans, and you can look up other last names. It also has quite a bit of the different variations that a certain clan may have worn (such as hunting, dress, casual, etc.)

Tartans of Scotland
Anderson Tartan and Crest
Rose Tartan and Crest

Something to do!

Well, to tell the truth when I found out a few months ago that I may not be able to work, I was kind of excited because I have not not worked since I was 16. I was also a bit apprehensive about it because I am not good at doing nothing. I know that being a housewife, or a stay at home mom, is a big job, but I have no kids to look after and I don’t have an extensive social calendar. We had found out that I could work a couple weeks into our stay here and it was up to me if I wanted to work and how much. I don’t have to work, our budget allows for that, but I have been going crazy at home. I of course go out and see the city, but there is only so much you can see and so many museums and historic landmarks you can see before they all start looking the same. So as of Wednesday, October 4 I am working for a temp agency here. I love it! I can work when I want to and don’t have to accept a job if I don’t want to. This week I will be working for an ad company called AdTrailers. It’s quiet interesting. It’s a small run company and since most people know she’s out of the office, I am allowed to bring a book and explore the internet at my leisure. Pretty much, I am excited to get out and do something.

More pictures

This is the University of Glasgow. The building is beautiful. It reminds me of Harry Potter and I love walking through the grounds.
This is the 'lawn bowling' (bocce ball) courts at Kelvingrove Park. Anyone want to come over and play??

These next few pictures are from the Glasgow Cathedral. The stained glass windows were designed by local schools. There was lots to see here and everything was beautiful. We were very lucky and were able to see it on a sunny morning, so all the light coming through the stained glass windows was amazing.




This is a picture of a fossil of a crinoid at the Hunterian Museum. As most of you know, I am slighty obsessed with rocks and fossils. Well, I stumbled upon this exhibit full of rocks and fossils by chance, and cannot wait to go back... possibly this afternoon!

The River Clyde

It was a beautiful sunny day on Saturday, so we decided to walk down to the Clyde. As we were walking down the waterfront we found a boat tour called 'The Pride of teh Clyde'. We decided to take it and it was really fun. We were able to see quite a bit of the city's waterfront and hear all about the history of the ship business of the Clyde. I hadn't know that they were that well known for their ship building. At the end on the tour we were dropped off for a bit at a HUGE mall (galleries here), but the nice part about it was that we could see some of the rolling hills of the countryside. They were beautiful and now we are trying to plan a bus trip out to the country for the day. Here are some pictures of our boat trip...



This is a picture of the Opera House here. It of course was modeled after the one in Australia.
After we returned from our boat tour, we headed down to Glasgow Green, another one on Glasgow's beautiful parks. The Park Rangers give tours here on Saturdays and Sundays, and since the weather was still nice and sunny, we decided to take advantage of it and go on the tour. It was a very nice tour and I have to admit I have become addicted to them because you learn so much more about what is in the park than you would if you were just walking through. The tour lasted about an hour and we still haven't walked through a large chunk of the park. Thats for another day. After we tried the ice cream over here and it was divine, not as good as Chile, but a close runner up. There are indoor gardens there, but there was a wedding at 5pm and the wedding party had shown up for pictures already and we didn't want to interupt. Here are some pictures from the tour:

This is the tallest terra cotta fountain in the world. This just cleaned it up and fixed it and now it is under close watch for any vandalists.

Pictures..

Since for some reason the computers here see it as a security risk for me to upload pictures most of the time, I am going to do it this way....

The beautiful Kelvingrove Art Museum and Gallery... we spent about 3 hours in there one afternoon and still have not seen even half of it!

This is from the French Market that was up during the Merchant City Festival. We bought meat from this booth and I even tried it. It wasn't too bad.

This picture is from the Merchant City Festival too. These three guys dressed up like this, had music blaring from somewhere and where riding around on those electroglide things. They were great!

This is a view of the City Chambers building on one side of George Square. We only live a few blocks from here and pass through this square about everyday.

We took a tour of the Necropolis during the Merchant City Festival. The Park Rangers give tours of all sorts of places, and this one was our first. It was a 2 horu walk through the park and we learned all sorts of neat
facts about the Necropolis and the city.