Our second and third days in Glasgow were great days of wanderings. We started by heading over to the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum. Walking there from town took us through a wonderulf green park with fountains, statues and daycare kids being walked around.

The Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum was pretty neat. We ignored the museum part, which was mostly for kids, but the Art Gallery was really interesting. They had a few Monets, Picassos etc. What was great though was that the descriptive blurbs on the walls told you what was interesting about the painting, be it the story in the picture or the way the painting was done. The highlight of the collection was a Rembrandt work of a soldier mostly in shadow. Really wonderful.

After the Kelvingrove Art Gallery, we wandered up and around the corner to the Museum of Transport. What we didn’t realize was…

Crap.

So then we just wandered back to town and watched the afternoon world cup match instead.

On our third day in Glasgow, we did *more* wanderings. We found a daily art installation installed by the local smart-artists despite the council’s regular removal of it. Fantastic.

But the main highlight of the walk was toward the other side of town – the Glasgow Cathedral.

It wasn’t the biggest cathedral or the most stunning. However, it was the only cathedral in Scotland to survive the Reformation 450 years ago almost entirely whole. The Protestant community is very proud of that.

Below on the right is a banner that was flown in Egypt in 1801 by the Scots Regiment of Foot Guards. Pretty awesome.

The staioned glass windows were definitely stunning, but it turns out that many of them had been replaced in the early part of last century, thus why the colours are so bright and clean.

Right next to the cathedral was the Necropolis, the cemetary built all over the neighbouring hill. There were old crypts and huge monuments all over this cemetary, and the top of the hill gave quite a view of the city. But it felt weird to take pictures in a cemetary, so we only took one at the gate.

The final sight of the day was the oldest building in Glasgow called Provond’s Lordship. It was an example of 15th century domestic architecture. The ceilings and doorways are low and the roof beams bowed and crooked. Brilliant. They had false floors to protect the orioginal floorbaords in some parts of the 3 storey house, which made navigation a bit interesting. For a free admission, it was pretty neat.

Glasgow isn’t as pretty as Edinburgh (all its old buildings were bombed to hell during WWII because Glasgow was where the big shipyards were) but is certainly worth a look and is a good based for day trips to southern Scotland.

After our days in Glasgow, we flew back to London. More about that trip in our next blog post…