After a wet morning the sun is shinig in Oban for our boat departure. No internet while we are on the boat so we are off the air for a week…expect lots of pictures when we get back😀📷

We caught the train from Glasgow to Oban this morning – we get on our cruise tomorrow (Saturday afternoon Scottish time) but wanted a bit of time to have a look about.  It rained on the way up but this afternoon was pleasant for an amble around town.  Our hotel is a refurbished Victorian building on the harbour in the centre of town.  The town is buzzing with tourists and locals out in the pubs watching World Cup games.

I was first here 29 years ago 😳 as a back packer in the middle of winter –  a few things have changed! Here’s John up at McCaig’s Tower, fishing and tour boats in the harbour and the main esplanade.

We walked out to the St Columba’s Catholic Cathedral of Argyll and the Isles – quite possibly the plainest Catholic church I’ve been in but impressive in it’s way:

Our walk up to McCaigs Tower was pleasant – views back over the harbour as well as some local colour:

Once we are on the boat tomorrow afternoon very limited internet for the trip so the posts of puffins (🤞) will have to wait!!

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!

It started out a bit wet so we took a tram out to Temppeliaukio Church, which is carved into a rock in a small hill in a suburb just outside the city centre.  It’s quite lovely – very simple inside, a little like early round Christian churches or being inside a theatre.  The walls are rough rock and the ceiling is a huge copper disc which sort of hovers above you.  Apparently it’s used for concerts as the ascoustics are amazing.

By the time we took the tram back to town for lunch the weather had improved and by the time we went to the Design Museum after lunch it was bright and sunny – just in time for the various Helsinki Day events planned for the afternoon and evening.

It’s not a public holiday, but lots of places normally closed to the public had open days, some museums were free, and there was a concert in one of the big parks.  It was obviously very popular and drew people into the city, and combined with the sunny afternoon it gave the city a happy feel.

The Design Museum was free and busy as a consequence.  It focuses a lot on Finland’s glass industry, particularly Iittala and it’s most well-known designer Timo Sarpaneva – lots of the items on display were very familiar from my 70’s childhood!

So, here’s Temppeliaukio and a few of my favourite things in the Design Museum:

As promised, some food tour highlights:

Yesterday we spent the best part of the day on a guided food tour learning about various traditional Finnish foods, a bit of the history of Helsinki and tasting various things – barley porridge wasn’t a huge hit, but some other things including salmon, wurst-style sausages, beer, gin, and sea buckthorn licorice were interesting and tasty.  Heather our guide is a Helsinki-resident Australian married to a Finn so she was very knowledgeable about Finnish food and food traditions but understood that we would find some of them a little strange.

We started the tour in the food hall of Helsinki’s premier department store Stockman – for those of you who know Wellington it was a bit like Moore Wilson’s on steroids- with lots more in-house ready prepared foods.  We tasted salmon and some amazing licorice including one coated with sea buckthorn and chocolate – better than it sounds.

Finland has a really short growing season and unsurprisingly a lot of it’s traditional food is based on root vegetables  – particularly potatoes and grains  – both of which keep over the long winter.  So we tried barley porridge (not my thing)  and rye flour pastries filled with rice porridge (a bit bland).  From there it got a bit more interesting with pork sausage (like a german wurst) and sauerkraut with a beer tasting for lunch, a cheese tasting,  jams using local berries (sea buckthorn again – like a really tart fruit bomb) and coffee and pastries to finish.  And back at the hotel we had our own local gin tasting 😀!

More pictures will follow….

We arrived last night after nearly 24 hours of flying but with the really long summer days (the sun isn’t setting until 10:30pm) we had lots of time to freshen up and then take a walk to get our bearings.

Our hotel is close to the city centre in an area promoted as ‘the design district’ so there are lots of interesting shops and eateries as well as interesting architecture.

I’ll write a fuller post tomorrow but here are some pics from our walk around last night:

Helsinki. Cathedral, Senate Square

Some imposing characters on the facade of the Railway Station

Art Museum

The old harbour area

Architectural detail on a shopping arcade

Bit more sculptural detail

I’ve been wanting to do this walk for a few years but we never quite managed to fit it in. After Christmas, on the spur of the moment, I checked bookings and lo, we could fit it in before our trip to Brisbane. We didn’t do much preparation, but it is only a three day walk…even if it got to 33C on the first day!

The walk is on private farms on the Wairarapa Coast (nearish to Martinborough). The accommodation for the walk is in converted farm accommodation and a purpose built lodge on the coast. We had good weather, even though it was hot on the first day. The terrain is mostly open farm land, although day 2 is mostly along the coast and quite short.

So here are a few pictures from rural NZ…

2017 wasn’t exactly a stellar year for us in some ways – my Mum died in June and so we’ve been working through the administrative and emotional consequences of that.  But now we are doing well, all the administrivia of her estate is sorted and my Dad, John and I are looking forward to new adventures in 2018.  These include my going back to university to start a Graduate Diploma in Italian in March, a trip to Scotland in June, seeing various friends here and in Australia when we are over in February, and my Dad finally properly retiring from his business.

Wishing you all a happy and prosperous 2018.