Today I was meeting Alex at the Art Galleries in Glasgow’s West End.
Scamp gave me a run up to the station and I trained it in to Glasgow. The light was beautiful when I came out of Queen Street station, so I grabbed a few shots of the buildings and one sneaky wee shot of a bloke leaning in a doorway where they were ripping out the inside of a shop to make it into another shop that would last a year or so before going to the wall and needing another makeover. “It all makes work for the working man to do” as Flanders and Swan sang many years ago. I walked through a lane to Buchanan Street and got the subway from there to Kelvin Hall and walked from there to the Art Galleries, or Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum to give it its proper title. On the way I passed what used to be one of our favourite restaurants, Usha’s. A vegetarian Indian restaurant. Now it’s a German Doner Kebab place. Possibly the exact opposite of an Indian vegetarian restaurant!
I took some photos outside Kelvingrove while I waited for Alex. A bus was parked outside the galleries and a group of drivers were being photographed. I don’t know what it was all about, but presume it was some new service that Glasgow Council have dreamed up. We walked round the museum part of the building and I took a few photos of the main hall with its pipe organ. Sadly no organ recitals today, probably something to do with Covid. Alex took some shots of the stuffed animals with his new acquisition, a Sony A6000 with a Zeiss standard zoom. Very nice! He’d kept quiet about that! After we’d had our fill of the stuffed animals and the beautiful Spitfire that hangs from the roof we went for lunch in the restaurant.
From there we made our way up to Glasgow Uni which was where Alex wanted to go today. Amazingly, I’d never been through it and was surprised that proles like me were actually allowed in. Light was fantastic today. My favourite place was the east quadrangle with a beautiful beech tree place, not in the middle, but towards one corner of the lawn. Alex wanted to visit the chapel and I did like the stained glass windows at each end and the lovely warmth of the wooden pews. I must go back again some day and have a second look at the Uni.
After a bit of shilly shallying I worked out how we should go to the Botanic Gardens, but by the time we got there, the good light had gone, so we headed back down Great Western Road to Kelvinbridge and the subway back to town, but before that there were street art paintings for Alex to photograph while I was amazed to see a bloke in a kayak shooting the rapids of the fast flowing River Kelvin. He seemed to be struggling against a fearsome current, but enjoying every minute of it. One of those shots made PoD. Today’s prompt was ‘Sprout’ and I made up a bit of a fairytale about a boy who sold a cow for some seeds … You’ve maybe heard it before.
Subway back to Glasgow and a cup of coffee before we split up to go our separate ways, vowing to do it all again in a couple of weeks. By that time he will have mastered his new camera and amassed a bag of lenses, no doubt. I got the bus home, just managing to get it before it left the stance.
Dinner tonight was beef olives for me and mixed veg and potatoes for Scamp.
Tomorrow we may go dancing in Paisley.