I don't really remember turning 30. There are no photos or blog posts of it. I'm sure we had cake. Probably from Traina's. Decorated in red and green :) I know we were living in Ruston. In a house on West Kentucky Avenue. We'd been married exactly 10 years.
Randi was 7 and spent her days at A.E. Phillips. Ross was 1 and 1/2 and spent half days with my parents. I worked part time as a secretary for the Soil Conservation Service and Jim worked at the Woodsmith in Homer.
That seems like a lifetime ago.
Life was good.
And it still is.
Today, our son-in-law of exactly 6 years 11 months will turn 30. I hope there will be a cake and some photos so in 20+ years he can recall it just as it was.
But mostly, I hope he has the good fortune to recall that . . .
Life was good.
And that . . .
it still is.
Happy birthday, Josh. It may be later than sooner, but we're looking forward to taking you for one of those Kwak's pictured in my blog header photo!
We've had the good fortune to travel to a lot of places we'd only heard about a few years ago. Never thought for a moment we'd visit any of them. Now that we have, we've got a short list of places we'd like to see while we're in Europe.
Of course, we won't see them all and that's fine. But there's one place we thought we should see - it's not officially in the top 10 most visited cities (yet), but you'd never know it by the article I recently read entitled "Help, the Tourists are Coming!".
According to the article by Frank Rumpf, published in Die Welt, a German newspaper,"European cities are fed up with the hordes of tourists that are threatening their quality of life."
The particular city I'm referring to is Berlin. Although it's a 7 hour drive from our house, we've certainly driven farther than that. But do we want to?
In 2009, nine million tourists visited Berlin. In 2011, that number went to 10 million making it nearly as popular as London, Paris and Rome. The newspaper article says there are "three tourists for every Berliner."
I kind of feel guilty about even wanting to visit this city that is obviously swamped with people like me. But here's a little perspective . . . as the newspaper article points out - New York is the clear winner in terms of tourism with over 50 million tourists per year - more than the entire population of Spain!
So, New Yorkers may not have a problem with all the tourists, but Berliners, who seem to, can now purchase T-shirts that proclaim "I Am Not A Tourist."
They're in German, which won't mean a thing to anyone other than themselves, and that may be the point.
In a study by German consulting firm Roland Berger, most European capitals don't have a tourism strategy. I guess this would be Berlin.
But there's hope. Hamburg, Germany.
Apparently Hamburg decided to capitalize on tourism rather than shun it and for ten years, it has grown to over 7 billion euros annually and furthermore, 96% of the residents say they don't have a problem with the tourists.
Perhaps we should add Hamburg to our short list. After all, it's about 2 hours closer than Berlin and they're actually looking forward to our visit.
We have had the opportunity to visit ye ol' Scotland a couple o' times since moving to Belgium and we got to go again this past weekend. This time we visited the city of Glasgow.
Glasgow is the largest city in Scotland with over a half million people. Scotland has a total population of about 5 million. Scotland is, of course, one of the countries of the United Kingdom. The others are England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
photo by ephotopix
Here you can see Glasgow in the southern half of Scotland.
The main square is called George Square, named after King George III. George was king of Great Britain and Ireland and lived from 1738 to 1820, and incidentally was the king when America gained its independence.
The square is home to several bronze sculptures. I have no idea who this statue depicts, but the seagulls love him.
And they aren't particular either. This seagull is perched atop the statue of Queen Victoria in George Square.
The huge building in the background is the City Chambers which opened in 1888. It serves as headquarters for the City Council.
There are free, guided tours each day, but sadly, not on weekends, which are the days we were there.
This and the photo above, found on the internet, certainly show a beautiful and ornate interior.
This is the Glasgow Cathedral - not Catholic, yet it was free to enter. It's actually Church of Scotland and is only called a cathedral because it was once Catholic.
It was built in the 12th century, before the Reformation, and is one of the few churches to survive the Reformation.
This is called the Necropolis - meaning "a large and elaborate cemetery of an ancient city". It's a Victorian cemetery, established in 1832, with 50,000 individuals buried on its 37 acres. You can see the view of the city in the background.
Glasgow may be most famous for its university, the University of Glasgow, established in the 15th century.
The campus, home to about 23,000 students, was beautiful, immaculate, green and perfectly manicured.
This is the Kelvingrove Art Museum. It's free to enter and boasts of having a real Spitfire (that's a war plane built in 1944).
This is the Gallery of Modern Art. The building was originally built in 1778 as the home of a wealthy tobacco lord. The statue in front is the Duke of Wellington. The traffic cone is said to symbolize "the city's light-hearted attitude toward authority".
This is the People's Palace, a social history museum telling the story of the people of Glasgow, who, by the way, are called Glaswegians. Behind the museum is a greenhouse known as the Winter Gardens. It is exactly what its name implies - a winter garden.
In front of the People's Palace stands the largest terracotta fountain in the world. This huge fountain ,called The Doulton Fountain, was gifted to the city by Sir Henry Doulton in 1888.
Some of the fountain's detail. Henry Doulton was an inventor and manufacturer of pottery. You may have heard of Royal Doulton?
This is the Botanic Gardens. Created in 1817, their purpose was to supply the University of Glasgow. It has 23,000 sq ft, but this is all we saw of it because by this time our feet were too tired :)
It surprised us to find the weather in Glasgow was really beautiful - mostly sunny and cool . . . buuuuuut since it rains nearly every day, this one was no exception :)
Glasgow, Scotland, U.K.
If you're interested, here's a short slideshow of our trip to Glasgow. After ye click on the arrow to Play, ye can make it full screen by clickin' on the box in the bottom right hand corner.
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