Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum

The Kelvingrove is the most visited site by tourists in Glasgow. It's a combination art and natural history museum, housed in a beautiful building. The original museum, established in 1901, was in a house which was destroyed by fire. This building was built in the 1920s and closed for three years in the early 2000s for refurbishing. We were going to take a hop on bus and maybe hop off there but the buses didn't start until 3 because many streets were closed for a 10K Women's Race. So we took an Uber and got as close as we could to the museum.

Kelvingrove Museum

The museum is free. I've been neglecting to mention that everything is free in Scotland--museums, botanical gardens, cathedrals. For the few tourist sites that aren't free, seniors ("concessions") pay about half of the regular fare.  For example, the hop on bus is less than 9 pounds for seniors and 20 pounds for those young people. It's second only to Spain for reducing prices for the elderly.

The museum has a lot of exhibits dealing with the history of the Scottish people, a collection of armor, and artifacts from many world cultures.  We didn't see a lot of that but concentrated on the art. It has a lot of art from Scottish artists who, unfortunately, neither of us ever heard of.  It seems some of Scotland's most famous artists are the Glasgow Boys, a group of about 20 artists who rebelled against Victorian art. Their biggest inspiration was Whistler and you can see it in some of their paintings. They were also influenced by Dutch and French contemporaries. Each one developed his own style and many moved away from Glasgow but they remained friends for life. There was also a group called the Glasgow Girls but their art wasn't as represented in this museum.

Floating heads--no explanation was given

Looking down on a Natural History display

Museums are known to be tiring so we cut short the visit and ate lunch at a nearby Spanish tapas restaurant.  Their wine was the best we've gotten in Glasgow. It's a whiskey town so they don't care too much about the wine drinkers. But the Spanish do, of course.

After laundry time (I'm down to the last load with probably no chance to do laundry in Romania), we went back to the Glasgow Cathedral for evensong. We discovered this service at a cathedral in Bath, England. The service consists mostly of choral music sung by professional choirs. The pipe organ in the cathedral is amazing and the choir was especially good. There is some Bible reading and short prayers but no sermon. The service takes around 40 minutes.

When we walked out, we ran right into a very small parade.  They seem to break out around us wherever we go.  The marchers were The Prince of Wales Accordion band.playing Amazing Grace. Since there weren't too many people in the parade, it was hard to get a picture. Plus, the women's hats were especially nice. We discovered it is Whitsun today and although discontinued here, Whit Monday is a holiday in some other countries. Some people wear orange but I don't why.

The accordion band marches on Whitsun

Finally, building murals are common; here is my favorite: