Usually when we come to Glasgow we stay with Jeanette and Andrew (my cousin and her husband) at Elderslie which is about a half an hour by train from the city.  We do trips in but this time as we had to pass through Glasgow twice (the most efficient way to use public transport to get from our cruise to our walk) I wanted to use one of those stops to get to know the town where my parents met and courted a little better.

Unfortunately the weather has not cooperated – it’s been damp, cool and windy as Storm Hector blew itself out yesterday giving Glasgow a distictly Wellington feel!  Anyway, we used the afternoon after we arrived from Helsinki to explore in the town centre and yesterday to explore the west end around the University of Glasgow and Kelvingrove.

Unlike Edinburgh with its vista from the Castle over the city, no where in the centre of Glasgow is really high.  And while there’s any number of places to buy tartan (!) Glasgow feels less about catering to mass tourism and more about Scots.

It’s the celebration of the 150th anniversary of the birth of the Glaswegian architect Charles Rennie MacIntosh so yesterday we got in the spirit and visited the recreation of his house at the Hunterian Art Gallery at the University and the exhibition at the Kelvingrove Museum.  Fair to say we are ‘Macintoshed out’! Weather conditions unfortunately weren’t conducive to exploring the uni architecture or Kelvingrove Park, but we found a couple of craft beer pubs (it’s a thing here too) for pit stops on our very long walk.

So here are a few pic taken beween showers of the view from The Lighthouse in the city, the university (reminds me of Otago!) and Kelvingrove Museum.

And I couldn’t resist putting these in — the face is from an installation at Kelvingrove and where else but Scotland would a kilt be a standard item on a drycleaning list!