spud says hi

Museums of different kinds

While I was in Riga, I took a day to go out to the Latvian Open-Air Ethnographic Museum, just because.  I caught a bus just outside Old Riga, and traveled along the big main road for almost 40 minutes.  And then I found myself walking in the woods next to a lake.  It's a big site, mostly forested, but dotted here and there with wooden structures from Latvia's different regions.

It was a good time to be there, in that the trees were all changing color.  As I walked around I saw various people raking leaves, and smelled a few piles of burning leaves here and there.  The scent added something to the day.

The most dramatic structures were windmills, which were usually placed up on hills, but which would have towered over everything else even if they had been on the same level.

I loved the curve of the roof on this house. 

And I also loved the dramatic slope of this chapel roof.

Moss grew thickly on almost all of the roofs.  Apple trees were casting their apples to the ground, big palely glowing globes shining against the dark leaves.  And mushrooms popped up here and there, like these tiny white ones, or a big red capped, white stemmed one I saw later (sadly, after my camera battery had died).

Now I'm back in St. Petersburg, with one week to go.  On Friday, one archive was closed, and I had no documents waiting at the other one I sometimes go to.  I could have gone to the library, but since it was beautiful and cold out, I decided to do something different.  And so, I went here.

That's the Hermitage, seen from under the arch of the Glavnyi Shtab building across the square.

I had a realization--the last time I actually went into the Hermitage was in June 1998, when a friend (hey, RH) came to visit me.  It seemed time to rectify that situation.

The thing about the Hermitage is that the museum itself nearly overshadows the art contained within it.  The museum is located in a series of buildings.  There's the Winter Palace of the tsars itself, which is mostly left as state rooms still in all their imperial opulence and glory.  One of them, though, had a special exhibit that was enough to overshadow all that imperial opulence--gems of the Mughal empire.  You have never seen so many emeralds and pearls in one place.

But then, even a fair bit of the part that was built to be a museum is intensely ornamented.  Like, uh, this.

Or this "loggia," which is so fancy that they don't even bother to put art in to compete with it.  The only rooms that are plain are those on the third floor that contain the late 19th early 20th century French art (i.e., room after room of Matisse, Monet, Renoir, Picasso, just about all from the collections of two men, Morozov and Shchukin [huh, interesting]) and a strange set of rooms off a passageway on the second floor.  They're not marked on the map of the museum.  There are no signs pointing you to them.  But they, too, contain late 19th and early 20th century mostly French art, in this case art "removed from Germany after the war."  Or, "hidden treasures revealed."

The other thing about being in the Hermitage is that even in the plain rooms, the windows can be distracting, because the site of the museum is so amazing.

Look out one side, and you gaze over the giant palace square, with the curve of the General Staff building, and the monument to victory over Napoleon.

Look out the other, and you see the Neva river, and the spire of the Peter Paul fortress.

Even better, stay there long enough and enjoy the brilliant colors of sunset behind the Kazan' cathedral as you walk home.

Vilnius, land of churches

Yesterday as I was walking down a street near Vilnius University, it hit me--the old town of Vilnius oddly reminds me of Lisbon more than anything else.  It's something about its lived in, slightly worn look, and the fact that it's a place that hasn't been scrubbed all clean and pretty like some other eastern European old towns have been.  And it's also something to do with a lot of the architecture--there's another Baroque church around what seems like every corner, and my memory is that Lisbon had some very similar church architecture.  This actually makes sense, given that Portugal and Lithuania had relatively similar periods of peak power.

One of the things that has been cleaned up is the huge cathedral that forms sort of one corner of the old town. It backs onto the river and a hill, and opens here and to the side away from where I was standing to take this onto a huge square.  South of it is the old town, and west is the new town, with wider, straighter boulevards and more art nouveau.

 

Inside it has a few opulently decorated side chapels, and a fair number that are still under reconstruction.  But the ones that are finished are...

 

...well, pretty spectacular.

The main body of the church is much plainer--well, maybe plain's not the right word, as this isn't exactly plain, but it is fairly stark white.

If you climb up the hill behind the church, you get views out over the river, toward another hill topped with three white crosses, and down across the city.

Once you're down in the city, you're struck by a few things.  One is that this is an old city that's had a lot of bits and pieces inserted in it--there's a much bigger footprint of the twentieth century even in the old city here, with what I think are Soviet era buildings dotted here and there along with the much, much older bits.

But of course you're also struck by churches all over the place.

 

My favorite thing about them are the metal worked crosses at their peaks.  Each one's different and each one touches my geometric fancy.

This is actually just the entrance gate to a church complex, and it's by far the most spectacular part of the place.

The inner courtyard and church are much more touched by time.  Well, stained by time.  And yet, still with the cross.

 

There are actually two churches here.  The one covered in scaffolding behind the belltower is St. Anne's Church, supposedly the most spectacular church in Vilnius, the one that Napoleon wanted to take home with him after camping here in 1812.  Of course it's the one covered with scaffolding during my trip.  The one to the right is the church of the Bernardines (I think).

 
Its interior is one of the ones that shows the passage of time.  But it's still sort of lovely, I think.

I could post many, many more pictures of churches, but instead I'll just show this last one, of the utterly amazing dragon downspouts on this church (of St. Catherine).  I apparently have dragons on the brain on this trip, as I believe this is the third picture of dragon architectural details I've posted.  But... how can I not?

Riga, the "new"

The other big thing about Riga is its crazy amount of art nouveau architecture.  This is not all that surprising to me given my experience of other cities from the former Russian Empire, many of which went through big periods of expansion exactly when that style was au courant.  But, still, it's quite remarkable.

Some of it's just all scroll work and organic lines piled up on top of smoothly curving buildings.

An awful lot of it involves people holding up buildings.

To be totally honest, some of it's a bit too much for me as a whole--but what I do absolutely love about the style is its odd little bits and pieces of ornamentation.

Like a cat atop a tower.

Or, hey, how about two cats, a guy with a ladder, and... I can't tell, maybe an old timey hansa merchant?

Or a dragon guard.

Or an illustration.

One of the few things that makes me feel like I'm definitely in a city that has ties to the former Russian empire (other things: all the Russian spoken here, and the pelmeni) are these parts of the city.  There are still these small two story wooden houses here and there.  Not in the old city, which is all old old, and art nouveau, and then some twentieth century too.  But here, in the area just outside the old city, which is mostly filled with art nouveau buildings, the streets still have a fair number of these older buildings.  And on the west side of the river, where the archive is, there are even more of them, and fewer of the art nouveau era ones.  They totally remind me of the Russian provinces--all of the provincial towns I've been to have had these still sitting side by side with newer (and sometimes older) buildings, as development has rarely completely transformed an entire street.  (Moscow supposedly still had a lot of them up until the 1960s, or so a landlady once told me.)

I kind of think the plain wood buildings tend to throw these kinds of things in even starker relief--they highlight the crazy complexity of so much of the decoration, like this... 

Riga, the knitted

So, Riga's filled with mittens and socks.  Like, there are little stands all over the old city where people hawk amber, mittens, socks, and other souvenir trinkets.  All of the souvenir shops feature those two things.  It's a thing, maybe particularly at this time of year.

But none of those places had as beautiful display as the one above, hanging from a wall in a store of Latvian folk costumes that's almost a museum in itself.

It reminded me to search out this link, which I saw a few years ago and was awed by--and now seeing a bunch of them in person, I get it even more. Latvian mittens are indeed a whole art form.

Did I buy mittens?  No.

I bought yarn.  Six 100 gram skeins of very very wooly fingering weight which will, I think, be perfect for experimenting with mittens.  Or other colorful creations.  Though looking at the picture above, perhaps I should have bought more of the pale base color.  Hmmm.  Perhaps I should go back.

(And I have to say that this yarn purchase justified my tendency to wander around department stores and shopping malls in foreign countries.  I find them interesting.  And this one [the one big mall in Old Riga] had a yarn store tucked away on its top floor, with a barrel of this yarn sitting there.  Fantastic.)

And in a completely random happenstance, the yarn I decided to bring with me to knit on this side trip within my larger trip totally fits in with the colors I see all around me.

Kind of close to what I just bought, now that I look at it.  Hmmm.  I must have these colors on the brain, between the changing colors from grey green to golden of the trees in fall, the red of brick, the different grey-blues of buildings and water.

Riga, the old

I'm in Latvia, doing some research at the national historical archive, and also really, really liking being in Riga.  It's a lovely, lovely city.  I got in late on Friday.  My flight from Petersburg actually got me started in adventure mode, not because of anything scary with the flight, but because of a certain weirdness in line.  My flight was the last one out that night, and only one other flight was even dealing with check in while I was there--a flight to Moldova.  That actually caused minor hilarity, because people going to Moldova kept getting into the Riga line, and being surprised that there was more than one line.  This caused the cosmopolitan Riga-bound passengers to giggle a bit at the poor country bumpkin Moldovans.  Then, of course, the Air Baltic in flight magazine had a letter from the CEO of the airline apologizing for long lines for the toilets at the Riga airport.  What the heck?

Anyway, even driving in from the airport in the dark, this place felt very much not like Russia (despite hearing Russian in the shuttle).  And then the next morning, that feeling was confirmed.  So, Riga.

I'm staying smack in the middle of Old Riga, in that yellow building on the corner there.  This is taken from the spire of St. Peter's, one of the many churches in the old part of town.

It's very much a twisty turny kind of old town, with little narrow streets, old old buildings, and funny turns.

I actually have to go outside to get my breakfast (which has included fried potatoes and sausage every day... which is why I'm walking to the archive rather than taking a bus or tram), but this is the passageway I go through.

But elsewhere there are even tinier streets that bend away from the eye.

Or funny dead ends with church spires towering behind them.

And peaked roofs pile up one behind the other, too--this is the view from my hotel room, off over a courtyard to the roofs beyond.  The odd shadow is cast by an oddly peaked church roof.  And though it's hard to see in the small picture, there's a seagull perched atop the tallest peak.

The old town just clings to the river (the Daugava), with its spires echoed by a TV tower (I think that's what that is) to one side,

and a rather striking bridge to the other.

Islands

St. Petersburg is made up of many, many islands (according to this site, 42), some natural, some carved out by canals and in many ways not significantly differentiated from one another.  Last weekend I went up and walked around two of them:  Kammenyi and Elagin. 

 

The trees are just starting to turn, but thanks to the ever-present water, those bits of color multiply.

Kammenyi Ostrov has dachas and a few--well, gated condos, I think.  And a lot of open space.  This was one of the more striking buildings, although also one of the more decrepit looking ones. I know it's hard to see here, what with the awkward angle of the sun, but the stairs were all moldy, and the place was pretty much on the edge of falling apart, I fear.

Elagin Island, on the other hand, has a palace.  A lovely, lovely, little palace.  (Obviously, it's only little in comparison with other palaces.)  Tsar Alexander I (victor over Napoleon!) had it built for his mother, the dowager empress Maria Feodorovona.  They appear to have had not the smoothest of relationships, in part because Maria's mother in law, Catherine the Great, took a perhaps excessive interest in the education of her grandsons.  And of course there's the fact that Maria's husband, Emperor Paul, was assassinated five years into his reign, and Alexander was put on the throne in his place.  So Alexander had some stuff to make up for, that's all I'm saying.  Well, and maybe he wanted to get his mother off into the outskirts of town, ON AN ISLAND.

The top picture showed the side of the palace that faces out to the river; this side, then, looks out onto a big wide field (which was being mowed while I was there, which made everything smell nice).

The ground floor is a series of gorgeously restored rooms that mostly open one into the next.  Every couple of rooms had an older woman sitting in a chair, serving as both guard and guide.  There were very few people there while I was there, so I had conversations with a few of them.

The woman in this room (the great oval room, which opens out to the river) felt I was spending too much time taking pictures and not enough time reading the signs informing me about the rooms.  But she apparently forgave me, and as I was leaving the room asked where I was from.  "America," I said.  "What's your nationality?" she then asked.  "Well, American..." I started.  "No... I mean... where do you come from?"  I knew what she meant (in the past I've had it phrased as "what kind of blood do you have"), so I started listing off all the countries my ancestors came from--which is a fair few, and she got tired of it after a couple.

 

The woman in this room--the dining room, which used to have a set of sixty chairs!--was charming.  She told me about the room in some detail, in particular about the chandeliers. 

"Do you see the little bells?" she asked.  At first I didn't, but they're little round things hanging from the very top circular piece of the chandelier, the piece that has the plumy bits sprouting off the top and the chains coming down below.  "Well," she said, "you know that before electricity they used candles.  And the heat from the candles would make the bells chime while people ate." 

The second floor of the palace was set up as a little museum of decorative arts.  Each room (of only a small part of the larger palace) had a different style of furniture from some part of the nineteenth century.  The craziest room was this one, which featured a "hunter's study," with heavy neo-Renaissance styled furniture all covered with forest animals.  There are bears and a rams head on the desk, bears and rabbits on the big bookcase you can kind of see behind it, and various other animals on other pieces of furniture.

 

Also slightly crazy, or at least a little unexpected?  The soundtrack to my day.  This man was sitting on the palace's portico, playing the sitar.  He clearly had permission, given that he was plugged into the palace's electric system.  I kind of wonder if he's the husband of one of the ladies inside.  Whatever the case, his music kind of floated through my visit inside the palace.  Then when I got outside, it started to be in competition with another bunch of music, coming from across the giant lawn.

These guys were playing dance music, as a bunch of couples, including quite a few couples consisting of two older women, danced happily in the autumn chill.

A few random things near where I live

Last weekend I decided to take a trip to some of the islands that are mostly parks here--but even before I made it there, there were some sort of interesting things along the way as I walked up to catch a bus.  Some were not actually all that interesting in many ways, but nonetheless struck me for various reasons.  Like, say this restaurant.

No, it's nothing terribly interesting on one level.  Except it appears to be a Western-themed steakhouse/saloon, named "Montana."  (Incidentally, on Thursday I walked past a Mexican restaurant called "La Cucaracha.")  And even weirder than that (well, maybe) is the cartoon figure the place uses.

I am, for whatever reason, always somewhat discomfited by images of animals getting ready to chow down... on themselves.

A bit further on, actually right by where I waited for a bus (for twenty minutes, since I just missed one and it was Sunday morning), there was this church, from the early 19th century.

There are actually quite a few of these small corner churches around town, but I quite liked the columns on the front of this one.  But it, too, had a rather discomfiting feature.  See those white rectangles on the side facing the camera?

I've never been terribly fond of the cherubs portrayed as just heads and wings.  Except maybe in a few paintings I've seen where the wings are rainbow colored.  But mostly, I find them slightly... well, a little creepy, to be honest.

Meanwhile, looking the other way down the street from the bus stop, there was this view, which is repeated all over St. Petersburg.  There are an amazing number of yellow stuccoed buildings with white trim, often involving columns.  Really, it's not just St. Petersburg.  Official building plans from the early nineteenth century called for buildings like this throughout Russia, so when there were fires and towns had to be rebuilt (not an uncommon thing), a lot of buildings like this one went up.

A long walk home

On Friday, I left the archive and took a long, wandering walk home.  This archive is located in an area called Kolomna, and it always feels several degrees colder there than in the rest of St. Petersburg.  This may not be my imagination--the archive is very, very close not just to one of the rivers, but to the actual edge of the city by the Gulf of Finland.

Not too far away is a Catholic church, which is a relatively rare thing in Russia.

It's named after St. Stanislaw, and its signage is in Russian and Polish.  It's an early nineteenth century classical structure.

And not too far after that is the Grand Choral Synagogue.

It's a very different sort of building (well, obviously), late nineteenth century and Byzantine in style--it makes quite a different statement on the street, though now one that's sadly emphasized by a guard post outside the door.

Then as you walk around, particularly, as here, when you get over on the Moika River, the dome of St. Isaac's lurks around it seems every corner.

Until you get close and take an arty shot that makes it seem like an angel statue is looming over it.

And of course there's other stuff.

Like this.  I don't even know what this building is, and yet I couldn't not take a picture of it.

Or this--one of the watermelon cages (hee) that seem to pop up all over the place.  This wasn't there when I went by in the late morning, but had turned up by around 4 when I was chased from the archive (by the great archivist--I'm not complaining!).

Or then there's helpful advice from the city of St. Petersburg.  These say, from left to right, "choose sport not beer," "an honest man does not buy a contract," and "don't drink and drive" (more or less).

Or this--the remnants of a building in the center.  Obviously, from the patches of different colored wallpaper and paint, an old apartment building.

Or some, er, rather explicit public art.

And of course, everywhere in the old center, even here at the Mikhailovskii castle, where Emperor Paul was MURDERED, there are wedding parties.  It's a little hard to tell in this one, because the bride's wearing a totally chic knee-length white coat, but it's a wedding party nonetheless.

I'm going to be knitting a lot of socks

I brought a ridiculous amount of knitting with me for this trip.  All the time I was in Britain I worked on a baby blanket for twin #2 (no pictures until it's gifted, though).  But I finished off all the yarn I'd brought for it by the end of my trip (my train travel, particularly my train delay, allowed for that) and so mailed it off back home from Oxford.

Then I also brought along the lace shawl I worked on during my spring trip.  And I happily started working on that again.

But alas!

Yes, one needle is now significantly shorter than the other.  Sigh.  First, I managed to break off the very tip of the needle--and I'm still not sure how I did that.  But with the help of a nail file (a sort of frighteningly effective nail file) I resharpened the point and kept knitting.  Sadly, however, I then managed to... well, I'm also still not sure what, but apparently I knelt on it or something, and broke off a couple of inches of the needle.  While I managed to sharpen it again into a workable point, it's just too short to use comfortably.  So, bye, shawl, for now.

And that means socks.  I also brought, for reasons that made sense at the time, four different sock yarns.  This is the first I've tackled, a golden version of Malabrigo sock, which I'm knitting in the well-loved (but never before knit by me) Monkey pattern.  Except I'm knitting it toe up.  And with a short row heel (which is now done, but I don't feel like photographing it again).  And I'm using a size 00 needle.  And knitting on the bus, despite being told by one bus conductor that I was not allowed to do so.  After a day of twiddling my thumbs on the bus, I decided she was making that up, and so started knitting again.  Not a problem, apparently.

The only problem with being in Petersburg after two weeks of being a tourist in Britain is that I'm a little touristed out, and thus am not inclined to go to scenic places and take pictures.  But the benefit of being in St. Petersburg, and particularly with living in the center of town, is that it's hard to go anywhere and not find something scenic.  Like the canals, and the columned buildings, and the famed Cathedral of the Spilt Blood, built on the spot where Tsar Alexander II was assassinated in 1881.

I'm not sure what all those people were looking at, but it's a spot where canals and rivers come together in a confusing maze of water, streets, and bridges, girded with pastel buildings.  My bet is that it involved boats.

I didn't see the bridal couple I'm sure came out of this car, but they were probably having pictures taken either by the cathedral or in the gardens next to it.  And, man, that's a ride.  Make the car I saw covered with images from "From Dusk 'Til Dawn" pale in comparison (no, no pictures of that--it drove by, and I wouldn't have known what it was if it hadn't had "From Dusk 'Til Dawn" written out as part of the painting).

Petersburg is a funny city, in that although I think it's just lovely to walk around, even on a wet misty day like this (Saturday, of course, when the archives are closed and I don't have to work), I find it hard to capture that loveliness in pictures.

But so much of the beauty is in little things--like this building, which is ornately decorated in Russian style, but WITH DRAGONS.  DRAGONS!!!  How crazy cool is that??

And then there are even odder things, like this old church.  Its domes are gone, its brick exposed and a bit worse for the wear.  But you can see that cross put up there at the top--I was surprised to see that, because I figured this had long ago been converted to a sport center or some such thing.  But, no, even if it was, it's now been converted to an evangelical church.

There's always something in this city.

Last of England

This, yes, this, was my view as I sat at the breakfast table in at my B&B in Bath.  Lovely, gazing out over the city, with (usually, though not in this picture somehow) glowing blue skies above and peachy buildings below.

Of course, the fact that I'm gazing out over the city does indeed mean that getting to the B&B meant going up.  Which I would have realized if I'd looked more carefully at a map and noticed that a couple of the roads leading to it had the word "Hill" in their names.

I had a full day of wandering around the city in truly glorious late summer/early fall weather.  I took the free walking tour of the city sponsored by the mayor's office, and in our case led by a charming Welshman who settled in Bath a couple of decades ago.  We saw lots of Palladian architecture, which is all about balance and symmetry (though here, in the Royal Crescent, it's been slightly sullied by differences in cleaning and glazing).

I saw some signs of the coming of fall, as in the turning of the ivy leaves on this building, again an architecturally important spot on Queen's Square.

I went into the Abbey, which had remarkable ceilings, and such clear light on a day like that.  Everything seemed to glow.

So did the algae in the Roman Baths--here's a view of the side/source pool, looking into the Pump Room--that's that semi-circular window.  You can go in and have a taste of the water, which I didn't do.

Then this looks out from the lower level of the big main pool, up at the balcony, and out at the Abbey spires.  It's another place with literally layered history, layers that have been partially excavated for all to see.

And then I went to the Assembly Rooms, where above all I loved the chandeliers.  I can't imagine how they looked when covered with candles--nor can I imagine having the responsibility of lighting them all without knocking them (or the chandelier as a whole!) down.

And then, Oxford.  I was mostly caught up in my conference, which turned out to be a right good time.  It was my first ever women's history conference, and quite an interesting experience for that.  My paper was well received, and I got a couple of good ideas for how to interpret my somewhat inexplicable data, so academically it was a total success.  And in other ways it was a success, too--I met some interesting people, learned that the Brits can totally drink me under the table, and got away a little bit to take some pictures, too.  Above is my arty shot of the Radcliffe Camera.

And then there's this, of another crazy ceiling.  This one comes from an open room in (I think) the old Bodleian--which is, yes, the library.

Or a somewhat familiar feeling building in New College.

Or yes, more ivy, this on the outer building of Christ Church college.

Or a partial shot of that college's giant courtyard.  It was Open Day, so they had people pouring through, with a bouncy castle in the gardens.  But also, the coolest thing I did the whole trip (to a geek like me, at least)!  There was a little tent in the gardens where a bell ringer (like, someone who does the big bells in a cathedral tower) was doing hand bell ringing demonstrations, and I got roped in to finish out a group.  So I got to ring bells 9 and 10 for a rousing round of Polly Wolly Doodle, and of something else I don't remember.

So in other words, I was there with bells on!  Or at least in hand.

Open guidebook, pick a place at random

That's pretty much how I ended up stopping in York on my way back south from Scotland.  It sounded like an interesting choice when I first started flipping through guidebooks, and even though it might have made more sense to travel south down the western side of the country, the idea of visiting it stuck with me.  And as it was lovely, lovely, lovely, I'm quite glad it did.

To go between my B&B and the center of town I went through the Museum gardens, which included not only a museum, but the ruins of a 13th century (I think) abbey--St. Mary's Abbey.  Remarkable.

And then you go out of the gardens, across a street, around a corner, and, boom, you're confronted with a massive cathedral--or, this being England, the York Minster.  (And you'll also note that the weather started to change to the spectacular, too.)

Such a lovely ceiling.

Such odd little figures on monuments.  This crying angel was right across from a lovely plaque listing all the organists of the minster going back to the 1400s.

Such amazing windows, though it's a little hard to tell from this.  It's the age of the windows that's amazing--hundreds and hundreds of years old, and they somehow survived wars and fires and all sorts of damage.

It also has a very tall central tower up which one can climb.  Very slowly, in tiny little circles that start to fade into one another.  Fortunately they control access, so they let a group up, get them all up to the top, and then let the group down.  It was gorgeous just being there.  There were also CRAZY swooping birds, which may have had something to do with the increasing wind and changing weather (it rained briefly a bit later, and someone I talked with on the train the next day said it stormed like crazy not far away).

You also look down into the old city, which has little crowded streets with buildings leaning over them.  It's a funny mix, too--there's a drug store, and a YARN STORE, and then also a Starbucks (right down on the corner at the bottom of the picture) and very touristy-friendly shops.  So it's both for people who live there and for people who are just visiting.

I'm also perhaps thinking that because I'm reading a novel that takes place in York--Behind the Scenes at the Museum, by Kate Atkinson, who I think is one of my favorite current writers.  Anyway, it kind of makes me think of LIFE in York, not just the passing throngs of tourists.  Interesting.

The old city is also mostly still surrounded by walls, and you can go along and walk them.  If I remember correctly, this is on a part of them that seems to have been built directly over the walls of a Roman garrison that was located here.  There's a truly great (or so I thought) exhibit in the undercroft of the Minster based on the archeological finds they made when doing a massive project to... well, to stop the Minster from falling down.  They found layers of history under the church.  And then the outsides of the church tell histories, too--like the strict puritans who came through and got rid of most of the "graven images," which means that there are places where you can see statues used to sit, but no longer do.

I had a picnic dinner on a bench in the Dean's Garden, which is a little park right under the Minster (I have a very soft spot for the food to go from Marks & Spencer, especially an edamame and tuna salad that I ate at least four times on my trip).  Even with the wind picking up and the sun hiding, it was a gorgeous spot to sit and gaze.

"It's a coo!"

I left Edinburgh for Glasgow midday on Sunday.  I learned a couple of things on the train ride.  One, that the quiet car on the train is kind of nice--because in the car I was in there were a group of lads heading back home after what I assume was a drinking kind of weekend.  And thanks to the volume at which a couple of them spoke, I learned a bit about that, and a whole bunch about their love for the oeuvres of Will Ferrell and Judd Apatow.  I'd have moved, except that they'd colonized the forward facing part of the train car and I wasn't going to give up a forward facing seat.

So, I had absolutely no expectations for Glasgow--I knew it had older bits, but that it had a lot of nineteenth century growth that was perhaps the bigger part of the city.  And in the end, I was pretty charmed by the city, except for one thing.  That was the buses.  I took a lot of buses one day, but in almost every case I was kind of randomly choosing one that seemed to go where I was headed.  There were no bus maps to be had--at the tourist information office they said they were being reprinted, so they had none to give out.  Frustrating!

Anyway.  I've just realized going through my pictures that I have none of one of the most important figures in Glasgow architectural and artistic history--Charles Rennie Mackintosh.  I went to his house/museum on the University of Glasgow campus, and also to the Glasgow School of Art, where I took the very nice student guided tour of the building he designed.  As someone who grew up in a place with a lot of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings, I couldn't help be at once reminded of those, but also struck by the very real differences in their styles.  Very interesting, though.

I also went to a couple of other museums--the Hunterian Art Gallery, which is tied in with the Mackintosh house, and which featured AMAZING stuff by Whistler, for one.

And the very first thing I did in Glasgow, once I got to my B&B, was go to the Kelvingrove Museum, which I loved to bits.  I stayed not even a five minute walk away from the place, and so walked over to enjoy the rest of the afternoon there.  It's a funny museum, because it's half art museum, half natural history museum (oh, plus a big organ in the main hall, which was being played while I was there, most awesomely), brought together really very cleverly, I thought.  One side was mostly art and one mostly natural history/history, but both sides had bits and pieces from the other mixed in. 

So this was the atrium for the art (or, "Expression", contrasted with "Life") side, with sculptures, but other stuff, too.  You can't see it, but next to the stairs on the left were small glass cases with stuffed animals (like, taxidermy stuffed, not teddy bear stuffed).  That's where the title of this post comes from. As I walked by, a little boy ran up to one case that had a stuffed calf in it and exclaimed, "it's a coo!"  I'm charmed by the Scottish coo--and even saw some big hairy Highland coos in a field the next day.

Basically, I just thought this was a cleverly curated museum that'd be great for kids, but was informative for adults too.  They did things like arrange the French art (i.e., Impressionists, mostly) room not by artist, but by grouping portraits, then landscapes, then still lifes, etc., and really giving nice descriptions of the genres as well as the individual paintings.  Just a great museum.

I saw the highland coos (I didn't take a picture, because they were mostly all standing with their extraordinarily muddy rear ends toward me) in the fields near the Burrell Collection, another museum, this time based on a private collection, located in a park in the southern reaches of the city.  It had an eclectic mix of things, from icons to antiquities to armor to needlework.  Included in the latter was this.

It's a beaded tray.  Crazy and opulent and ridiculous, on the one hand, but totally cool on the other, as far as I'm concerned.

I also went to walk around the Glasgow Cathedral--which dates from the 13-14th centuries, and is big and black and impressive.

The outsides were a bit worn by time--it's that pollution grey that permeates so much of the stone here.

But the insides were a little dark and grey, too.  I'm sure that was in large part because of the day, which brought a few glimpses of sun but which was mostly fairly gloomy.  But there's something about the stonework, too, that was a bit on the dark side.

It also had an interesting vaulted ceiling... though a very different one to the kind I just saw today, from several centuries later!  Just wait...

(Incidentally, I realized something the day after all of this... some time ago I was told something about ISOs, and manually futzed with the ISO setting of my camera.  And since then I haven't been all that happy with a lot of my pictures... like this one, where the light and dark are just out of sync.  So the day after this I reset my camera to the automatic ISO setting, and am much, much happier with the pictures I've been taking since then.  Again, just wait.  And also, this is a perfect example of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing.)

Up behind the cathedral is the Glasgow Necropolis, which I also walked around for a goodly while,  It's up on a hill, and is both quiet and quietly spectacular.

Then the weather started to turn, so I headed back to the West End, where I was staying, under the looming tower of Glasgow University, by a park and a rushing river.

Not at all a bad way to end the day, or my stay.

Two capitals

I've been traveling about the UK for the past week, wandering through little streets and strolling through museums to my heart's content.  Also, walking up and down a lot of hills, which I didn't totally expect, and which my legs are currently complaining about a wee bit.  But still, it's been lovely so far.

First there was a brief stop in London, just for a night, in order to get a wee bit acclimated (note the "wee," part of my preparation for Scotland).

It was, as you can see, not a particularly lovely day, but the rain mostly held off, and I took a very long walk and then slept for part of the night (and read for the balance of the night, which is par for the course for me with jetlag).  I walked through the British Museum briefly, then down through Covent Garden to the river, then across the river (on that bridge you can kind of see in this picture) to a yarn store behind Waterloo Station (iKnit, didn't buy anything), then over under the Eye, then across another bridge to the Houses of Parliament, then through Trafalgar Square, and then back to Russell Square and my room.

Anyway, this was good preparation for the next day, which was intended to include a nice four and a half hour train ride up to Ediburgh.  And which ended up being more like a... well, actually, like a nine and a half hour train ride (or set of train rides) up to Edinburgh.  There was heavy rain in Scotland, so my train got stopped for a good while at Berwick upon Tweed because the rails were flooded ahead.  Then they took us back to Newcastle, saying we'd need to take a train from there to Carlisle and from there to Edinburgh if we "wanted to attempt to go north."  Yikes.  Then as we approached Newcastle, the guard made an "alarming" (her word) announcement that the lines had been reopened and we should just grab the next train north.  Then the next train north (I actually waited for the second one, as I didn't much fancy standing all the way, which might well have been necessary had I taken the first one) got stopped right by the flood place because the train in front of us (presumably the first one) was having brake trouble and was itself stopped.  And I finally got in to Edinburgh at 7:30 instead of 2:30.

The big plus to this was that I talked quite a bit with some of the other passengers, including a lovely woman named Pat who I helped get to where she was going.  At one point in our conversation we started talking about WWII, because that day was the 70th anniversary of the start of the war (for Britain, at least), and she told me some of her memories of it. 

Then, Edinburgh!  It's odd, it wasn't quite what I expected, somehow, but I'm not sure why/how.  It's a very grey city, all grey stone (though my friend L, who I got to see there for the first time in like 15 years, noted that when one of the houses near her was cleaned of the accumulated grime of centuries, it was actually a pale peach stone), emphasized by the very grey weather I had there (grey, but not too rainy, so I'm not complaining).

Well, there was some rain, so I spent my first morning in museums.  I hit the Gallery of Modern Art, the National Gallery, and the National Museum of Scotland.  I saw some paintings I really liked, but of course virtually none of them came in postcard form.  The old building of the National Museum is undergoing a big renovation, but this is a shot of the new building.  Very interesting, though obviously not entirely watertight.

 

It also has a rooftop viewing platform, from which the view was spectacular.  The castle loomed...

And the potted rowan tree highlighted the grey rooftops.  And since from there I could see that the sky was clearing a bit, I headed away from the museums to Holyrood Park.

It's like a wild bit of moors... or, wait, highlands, I guess... right there in the city.  I did not climb to Arthur's Seat, due to first going up the "Radical Road" which was named after the politics of its builders, but could also refer to its angle of ascension.

But again, what a view, down over Holyroodhouse Palace, and out to the Firth of Forth.

The next day I went to the Botanic Gardens, because I like Botanic Gardens.

There was an enormous hedge.  How enormous?

Well, there's a random guy for reference.

Look inside it, too.

There were glasshouses, too--two big old ones from the mid 1800s, and then a series of new ones, too.

The old ones had cool features and tall palms.

The new ones had carnivorous plants, still bedecked with dew.

Good grief, where has August gone?

Honestly, folks, I don't know where my blogging mojo went this summer.  I think it was part not having my camera with me all that much, and not much feeling like writing about other things.  I had a lot of fun spending time with some very young friends here, and could write about how interesting I find seeing babies learning to imitate and to do things, or four-year-olds negotiating social interactions at the playground, but that just starts to sound weird.

And then there's the fact that most of my knitting has continued to be either secret or not all that interesting to photograph.  But one secret's out, so I can show that.

 

Here's a blanket for a twin--Knitty's OpArt pattern (original, ravelry), which was knit from the center out to the edges.  That means each row is four stitches longer than the row before it, which means you think you've made tons of progress and then it turns out you're only 13.2 percent through the whole thing.  How do I know this?  I made an excel file to calculate just that information (click here to download it).

 

The ravelry link above has my extensive notes on the project, which most of include the note that if you follow the directions exactly as written, the blanket's going to be much, much bigger than the written dimensions, unless you're a super tight knitter.  I did two fewer stripes than the small pattern, and still ended up with a blanket about 46 inches square (the pattern claims 38 for the small, IIRC).  I also used more yarn than the small pattern called for, even doing two fewer stripes.  And, since the final stripe even here took just over two balls of yarn alone, if I'd followed the pattern I'd have run out of yarn (I bought yarn for the large, fortunately).  So, BUY A LOT OF EXTRA YARN IF YOU CHOOSE TO KNIT THIS.

 

And here's the other major difference, and the difference that links up to my last post.  This is another project in garter stitch, which means either knitting every row if you're knitting back and forth, or alternating knit and purl rows if you're knitting in the round.  On those baby booties, I decided to eliminate seams by knitting in the round, and thus alternated knit and purl.  On this one, since the final rows were VERY VERY LONG, I decided I just didn't want to do that much purling.  I'm not someone who hates purling by any means, but I'm a lot faster knitting than purling.  So, I knit this back and forth, and then sewed one seam up the back.  It does make for a ridge, but since this pattern has a definite right and wrong side because of the way color changes look in garter stitch, I figured, what the hell.

 

I also did a nice i-cord bind off, which I think also gives this really a nice finished edge.

Now, of course, I'm in a bit of a quandry when it comes to knitting.  On Tuesday, I'm heading off again, first to the UK for just under two weeks, for some fun travel and a conference, and then to St. Petersburg for just under two months.  I'm actually nearly packed already, but I haven't made up my mind what knitting to bring.  Well, we'll see.

Things that are cuter in twos (or fours)

Cats.

 

No, I don't know why Ziti's laying like that.  I suspect he was sleeping normally, and then Sophie jumped up on the couch.  And then Ziti started slowly reaching down... just to touch her, of course, not to swat her or anything like that.  She, however, is clearly uncertain about his intent.

Turtles.

AKA, gifts for my soon to be niece and nephew.

This is my first stab at knitting toys, and I found it quite a bit of fun (though requiring a bit more sewing than I usually prefer).  The pattern's "Sheldon" (hah!) from knitty (here, or the pattern's ravelry page here).  It was very straightforward, and quite a nice easy knit.  For once, I used the called-for yarn and needles, though I did two things differently (well, three if you count using a different color for the second shell).  The pattern calls for you to knit almost the whole body and then stuff it... I put stuffing in the body before finishing the narrowing for the neck, and then finished the head at the end.  And I embroidered eyes with embroidery floss (not that well, I'm afraid) rather than use plastic eyes.

The shells come off... they're like little shell suits.  And they're just really cute, I thought/think.  A four-year-old friend "helped" me work on the brighter green one--he became quite fond of holding my yarn for me, which actually didn't end in disaster, even if the yarn moved farther and farther away from me and became a bridge.

Also cute when doubled?  Baby booties.

 

One pair's cute, but two pairs?!  These are Saartje's booties (see the pattern link on the side here, and the ravelry page here), which is a pattern I saw quite a while ago and have been meaning to make ever since.   I first made the blue pair, using leftover yarn from the socks I knit in Russia; it's Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sock in "Edgewater," knit on size 0 needles.

I knit one according to the directions, and then decided that in this particular case, I'd rather purl a little than seam (the stitch pattern is garter stitch, which means that if you knit back and forth [in this case, that would mean seaming the sole and heel of the bootie] you knit every row, but if you knit in the round [no seams, just sewing in ends], you have to alternate knit and purled rows).  And so I knit two new ones in the round, starting by casting on using Judy's magic cast on (which I had such a hard time with at first, but which is now easy as any other cast on) and then alternating knit and purl rows.  It worked well.

(Also Lorna's Laces, this time colorway "Tuscany")

I made one more change.  On the final knit row (the row before the cast off for the main bootie) I added in two more decreases, just to close up the toe a little bit more.  I like the shape that gives the booties a bit more than it would have been without it.  I don't know for sure that it made much of a difference, but I like the end result.

Right now I'm working on a baby blanket that's made me have a different take on the seaming/purling divide.  It's a garter stitch blanket, but knit in the round from the center out, with every row adding four stitches.  That means that by the end, the rounds are HUGE.  I've ended up deciding that in this particular case, I'd rather knit the whole thing and sew one seam rather than alternating knitting and purling.  We'll see how that comes out in the end.