Christmas

We decided to go to Glasgow for a couple of days before we were to fly to Germany on Christmas Eve. We caught the train over on Saturday morning and then found our accommodation. We went for a nice wander around the city - it's quite different to Edinburgh - much more industrial and the city is not as pretty. It's situated on the river Clyde which is quite nice, but the city itself is hilly and the buildings and streets are not particularly pretty. We went for a walk down the mall (which was of course madly busy being the weekend before Christmas!)! We went to the cathedral which was spectacular! It overlooks a fantastic cemetary on a hill, which looked incredible in the evening light (it was the day after the shortest day of the year, so the sun set about 3:30pm). We only had a short time in the cathedral as it was closing for the day. Then we went to Mungo's museum of Religious Art. Might not sound too thrilling but it was really interesting - all different religions presented together in one museum, it was great! We stayed about an hour there. Oh... on our way out of the museum we saw the Tardis. Just sitting on the side of the road! We both looked at it, then each other and had a good laugh! It was so strange seeing it just there! Very funny!!! Of course we're not totally sure that its _the_ tardis, but surely there's only one....??? ;-) Then we found a cool little pizza bar where we had a pizza, drink and then wandered back through the city. It's not the nicest city on a saturday night - lots and lots of middle aged men out drunk on the streets, something we just don't see in Adelaide really ever. Here it seems to be more common...

Sunday we got up early and walked through town to grab breakfast before going on the bus out to the Burrel collection which is about 20mins on the bus out of Glasgow, situated on a big country estate typle place - a lovely stream running through it, and nice gardens. It was cold, and there was lots of ice and snow around - a bit slippery at times! It was a great gallery - the whole back of the building had floor to ceiling windows, looking out onto this forest - right there! With birds and squirrels playing right in front of you - we almost enjoyed looking at theview more than the (very impressive) collection of art! There was art from all over the world, including egyptian, tapestries, religious art, islamic art, paintings, lots of beautiful sculptures and statues, furniture and lots of other things - it was really nice to wander around for a few hours. There wern't too many people there either, so it was easy to look at all the works. Definately worth a visit. We then headed back to Glasgow for a quiet afternoon before going out for dinner to a very cool Russian restaurant. The food was influenced from all places around Russia, and it was pretty tasty! We finished the meal off with a really good dessert but the highlight was probably the vodka. Chilled perfectly to -18deg and served in a shot glass, it was exquisite! We had the herbal variety which was meant to be good for digestion, but no matter what they said it tasted amazing and certainly makes me look at vodka in a different way. We're currently planning a trip to Russia!!!!

The next morning we got up about 4am and walked to the bus station (luckily only about a 10minute walk) to catch our bus to the airport. We had breakfast at the airport (mmm...baked beans), caught our flight, then at the other end (Germany), caught a bus to the train station and took 3 trains to get to Bitburg eventually in the mid afternoon... a looooong way! We were very pleased to see Yvonne meeting us! Zoe arrived later in the afternoon (Ronald was there already) and we had a fantastic long dinner for Christmas Eve celebration in the evening. It was fantastic! A real feast! We then went to mass and after that came home for pudding.

On Christmas Day we slept in a loooong time, till about 11am, which was glorious! Then after brunch we went for a great walk, at Irrel Falls, close to the border with Luxembourg. It was really beautiful - there was snow on the ground and the trees were covered in frost which was needle-like and the air was filled with this frost. The trees were mostly white and there was ice on the rocks in the river. It was a lovely long walk! We also saw some deer and had a nice view to Luxembourg. The rest of the week was similar - lots and lots of fantstic food, walking, chatting, relaxing, playing games - it was a really lovely week ;-) Back in Edinburgh for New Years (I had to work New Years Eve) we had a quiet night as it was cold and raining!
Happy New Year!