We hope that as 2015 draws to a close you have time to reflect on the past year and all it had brought to you - good and bad - and appreciate what's most dear to you.
We've had a great year - though not without some rough spots - and are grateful for all the experiences it has brought our way. It's pretty wonderful and exciting to be alive in these times and to have the ability to do all the things we do.
Here's some of what we've been up to....
Visiting the Peoples' Palace, in Glasgow, on a rare sunny day! A fabulous museum, it tells the story of the common Glaswegian people through the centuries. As you can see from the photo, it also has a huge greenhouse, and we spent a good while in the sunny warmth that day! Its lovely botanical exhibit provides a sense of the brightness of summer in the dreary months of winter.
This beautiful Asian-looking building was originally a rug factory!
The Duke of Wellington, outside of the Museum of Modern Art. He always has a safety cone on his head, no matter how frequently the council send a crew to remove it! It has become a Glaswegian icon.
The Christmas Fair in George Square downtown.
We've also been dancing a bit, and here are some dance-related pics:
Above is our dance instructor John Johnson, and button accordionist David. We had live music every week at dance class - that's pretty nice! We are grateful to have had some top notch dance experiences while here in Glasgow.
We also attended a few Advanced classes, and they were quite challenging. Here's one of the warm-up figures that we danced just to get the blood flowing. See if you can follow along:
Here are pics from one of the dances we attended:
Above is Melinda at the Helensburgh Christmas Dance (can you find her in there?). This was our second dance in a week, and we were practically celebrities at the dance once it was announced that a couple "all the way from Montana, USA, came to dance with us." Everyone wanted to dance with us after that!
Bob at the Helensburgh dance. We had an absolutely fantastic time dancing with all these wonderful folks! We even had a Scottish Country dance to a medley of Christmas carols- which was a novel and fun experience! At the break, there were more homemade cakes and sweets than we had seen all year. Scottish people know how to celebrate the season! Here's a wee video - Scottish Country Dancing in motion!
Riding around Glasgow on a daily basis...
Street upon street of tenement housing. Built in the Victorian era, there are pretty nice places. These days, the demographics of the neighborhood have shifted significantly- now many Asian grocers and Islamic bookstores line the storefront.
More rows and rows and blocks and blocks of tenement housing.
And in our own neighborhood of Pollokshields, some mighty fancy places can be seen:
Some are even mini-castles!
The Sherbrooke Castle (now a hotel) just down the road from us.
And the motorway... It has taken a bit to adjust to city living after months of camping in more remote locations.
A super cool cafe not too far from our place. We found out a little too late in our stay that they have a really fun and intimate session on Thursday nights. Next time we come to Glasgow we'll know the best places to go!
And more signs that we're as yet unable to interpret...?
At Richard and Marion's place. We met Richard dancing in Helensburgh, and he invited us to their home to try his Smallpipes. Marion plays recorder, so we had a go at that, as well!
Richard is fine tuning the drones while Melinda concentrates on holding a steady tone...well, trying to!
You can see the concentration necessary to pump the bellows with one arm, maintain bag pressure with the other arm, and operate the fingers to make a tune. It's not easy!! We both did quite well considering we've never done so before, but it still sounded a bit rough. If you don't apply enough pressure to the bag it sounds like geese are dying in droves. If you apply too much pressure then it sounds like a riot of Tom cats breaking free. If your pressure is variable it swaps between the two!
The recorders Marion plays are beautiful, and sound wonderful, too! We had a go on the recorders, just to expand our musical horizons a wee. What fun! We previously had no idea that recorders came in so many sizes. Marion is playing the bass recorder which has a rich deep tone.
The Glasgow Fiddle Workshop term is now ended, and we had a great time with them. On the last night if the term we had a HUGE session on the ground floor of the college. Each class played a couple tunes to share what they'd been working on, and then everyone played a few common tunes together.
Melinda took two classes each week, one guitar class and one fiddle class. Her guitar teacher is one of Scotland's top guitar players- Jenn Butterworth. We went out one night to a pub to hear her and Rua MacMillan from Blazin' Fiddles. These two musicians are elite players in Scotland, and Glasgow is the kind of place where one can pal around in a pub with such talent (and Ross Couper was in the pub listening, as well; he and Tom Oakes are another of Scotland's hottest fiddle-guitar duos). This is an amazing place!
And we had a fantastic time at the GFW Christmas dinner, where we sat with our German friends, Ulrike and Wolfgang.
Ulrike and Wolfgang had us over to their flat one afternoon and we played tunes together until late in the evening. They're visiting Scotland for a year or more, and are as amazed as we are by the musical opportunities in Glasgow! It truly is the land of milk and honey!
We've had a great time with the GFW - learned lots of new tunes, pushed ourselves to refine our technique, and met lots of great people - and we are sorry to see the term end.
In our spare time, we've also toured a few Charles Renne MacKintosh museums and exhibits...
This is the fireplace in the music room at The House For An Art Lover. It's quite an amazing structure, both inside and out. The house was built in the 1990s, based on drawings that MacKintosh submitted for a German architectural contest in 1901.
Here's the cabinet in the dining room. It's all very beautifully done, with detailing executed as MacKintosh himself would have demanded.
The outside of The House For An Art Lover. The carvings above the patio, designed from tiny sketches in MacKintosh's original drawings, are intricately detailed.
We'll leave it at that for the moment. We have lots more pictures to post, but we don't want to overwhelm you with too much at once! We'll put up another post before we leave Glasgow.
We hope you all have had a great Solstice and Christmas, and we're sending our wishes across The Pond for a happy and prosperous New Year to all of you. Stay in touch, and we'll do the same.
