More Art and Artefacts Than You Can Shake a Medieval Sword At

Wednesday morning we awoke to the rain falling gently outside. A rainy day in Glasgow was fine with us as we only had to walk a few blocks to the Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery . There we spent almost 3 hours looking at an incredibly diverse display of archaeological artefacts, historical weaponry, social commentary, and artwork. We saw paintings by Vincent Van Gogh, Claude Monet, and many other French impressionists, we saw huge paintings done for Scottish castles, we saw a World War II Spitfire and of greatest interest to me was seeing the original of Salvador Dali’s “Christ of Saint John of the Cross” - an interesting and controversial work (when it was first painted in 1951).

Perhaps the most moving artwork we saw was an unusual three panel set, painted on the back of old flour bags and created by an Italian prisoner of war (Giuseppe Baldan) for a mud chapel in the POW camp he was in. The flour bag paintings formed an altarpiece and depict the Madonna and Child flanked by kneeling angels. They are set against the backdrop of the prisoner of war camp. These paintings ended up in the Kelvingrove Museum because of a Scottish commander who was in charge of the POW camp (situated in north Africa) - this commander was humane and compassionate in his treatment of the prisoners, and they insisted on giving him the artwork at the end of the war (after he managed to save it from being destroyed from local soldiers). Reading the story of the paintings and then looking at the actual artwork almost brought tears to my eyes.

There was so much to see (that is an understatement), we totally missed the bird exhibit, and like Beth said to me, in the one gallery each of the paintings had interpretive centres that if you had the time you could explore the details of each painting - that one gallery alone could take hours! So maybe not the absolute “best museum and art gallery in the world", but we can certainly agree that it was big, it creatively displayed its collection, and there were some stunning pieces in that collection… and most astonishingly it has free admission! Amazing.

Back to the hotel to collect our luggage, and we were by the 4th generation of this family business! A very professional pre-schooler was helping her grandma, and dutifully took the key for the luggage closet and opened it up for Beth and I. Her grandma proudly told us that she has a lot of interest in running the hotel, and that certainly was in evidence at that moment.

We’ve started to figure out this train thing, like how to figure out which platform to get on, and which coach to get on, and when, and most importantly - what to do with our luggage. The train ride through the countryside on a rainy day gave us a picture of what I expected to see when coming to the British Isles, but as for the rain, so far it has mostly happened while travelling and hasn’t really put a damper on our plans at all.

By the time we got to Oxford in the early evening the rain had stopped. The taxi stopped outside our hotel, but at first I thought he was wrong - we could hardly spot it, since it was simply a small sign on a wall by a door, and nothing else. We rang the doorbell and were let in by a gracious, if somewhat informally dressed, host. He booked us in, showed us to our room. This hotel (or guest house as it is also being called) has real character: it has 17th century origins (which I was constantly reminded of as I kept banging my head on the low doorways); the floor in our bedroom was not level; old wooden beams showed up throughout the building; and of course the bedroom was small and we shared a bathroom with two other rooms… but the price was way better than the other accommodation in the area, and we are centrally located (ideally located as it turned out), it would be easy to walk to everything we want to see. While we did a little looking around that night, the real sightseeing would begin the next day.