Two Baroque churches

Koscoil Sw. Anny, or the Church of St Anne, is described by my guide book as “over the top Baroque”. What more can I say, it’s like an inside out wedding cake. Here’s the pictures.

It wasn’t my intention to go into the Church of St Andrew but I arrived there by accident. It doesn’t look as impressive as some of the other churches in the city but it is the only one to have survived the Tartar invasion of 1241.

I was almost deterred by the anonymity of the door and the heavy curtain behind it….

…..but once I was in what a treat. The church is very small and divided into two parts. Behind the locked gates it is plainly decorated with a few small pews and a confessional but in front of the gate it is a little island of Baroque extravagance.

I expect that behind the gate is for the public and in front is for the convent of Poor Clare nuns that is attached. Just to help my visit along, somebody struck up the organ while I was there and sang along.

The pulpit here was in the shape of a silver boat complete with sails laden with angels.

It is interesting to note that like the pulpit from St Anne’s, one of the angels of falling off.

Krakow

Last week saw me in Krakow with a group of folk from work for a teambuilding trip. We seem to have rather scored on the weather front. When you can sit outside a café in Poland to eat lunch in November there is little to complain about. From our table in the main square in the old town, the Rynek Glowny, we could see this building, the Sukiennice, which is a 13th century cloth trading hall but these days it’s full of stalls selling souvenirs.

Also from our table we could see Kosciol Mariacki or St Mary’s Church.

Every hour from its tower you can hear a bugle call known as The Hejnal - it’s apparently used on Polish radio for its time signal. The last note of the call is cut short to honour the watchman who raised the alarm when the city was attacked by Tartars but was killed by an arrow in the process. The bugler always waves to the people in the square when he’s finished.

A stained glass window in a restaurant on the square.

On All Saints day and All Souls day on November the 1st and 2nd, candles are left in graveyards in Krakow. I wasn’t in a graveyard while I was there but there are also candles left outside some churches and the many shrines left around the country and city.

Thursday night’s dinner was at the La Fontaine restaurant which featured one of the best sweet trollies I’ve ever seen. Each pudding carefully constructed by the waiter. Here’s a bit of black forest gateaux for you.

The old town is surrounded by a leafy park known as the Planty.

Carriage rides around the town are easily available. This one was spotted outside our hotel.

A statue of Nicolaus Copernicus, the famous 15th/16th century astronomer stands in the Planty. He studied at the University of Krakow.

This sign was over some steps down to a loo. I assume it means the steps might be slippy, but they seem very descriptive words to me.

On Saturday I went for a wander on my own in search of interesting churches (more of that later), art and anything else that took my fancy. I got as far as the station where I stopped for a badly needed cuppa and lunch.

The 14th century St. Florian’s Gate, part of the old city walls.

I’ve no idea what this wee bridge thing is but it’s pretty.

A stained glass restaurant sign I liked.

The Solidarity headquarters in Krakow, found quite by accident.

Hot baked Polish cheesecake mmmm!

I didn’t have time to go and see Wawel Castle and Cathedral but I did take this picture while crossing the river.

There was of course time for a wee drink here and there. This is not quite all of us being amused here.

Seven link blog challenge but without links.

Busy is good sometimes but not so good when it comes to telling you about it. In the last 5 weeks, I've been at home for 4 days so there's likely a million blogs that you've all written that I've not read - I'll find them soon. But to business and a good way to return from a slow blog period is probably with a review of previous posts. Jim over at the Glebe blog offered me just the very opportunity the other day in his post The Seven Links Blog Challenge .

I'm going to take liberties with the rules here. You're meant to pass the suggestion on to 7 other blogs and I'm not sure I want to decide which of my followed blogs I like the best - if I follow you, it's because I like you. Still feel free to have a go yourself and I'll be interested to see your choices (that is if I don't disappear into the undergrowth again and don't notice you've done it)

I had to select from my blog posts (this is number 128 at this site so there have been a few to chose from) which best fitted the following categories.

Most Beautiful Post

I'm not sure if I can say it's the most beautiful post but it features some of the most gorgeous sculpture I've seen for a long time. Inside with Jaume Plensa is only beautiful because it features some beautiful things so Mr Plensa must take the credit here.

Most Popular Post

There are two ways of measuring popular in a blog. The blog which has received the most comments is Motoring around Scotland which features beer and tea as well as ancient stones, a castle, a bit of scenery and a sunset. Seems eclectic may be the way to collect comments.

The blog with the most visits, I'm saving for another category. My second most visited blog was the first of my visits to the Sculpture Symposium in Kirkcudbright this year. It was a great week for art - I did 3 visits here to the symposium and another 3 to the Kirkcudbright Arts and Crafts trail which was on at the same time - the first blog for that can be found here . Between the two events, my blog had more visitors that month than any other.

Most Controversial Post

If you're looking for controversial, then you are rather in the wrong place. That said, there are things that some people like that really don't ring other peoples' bells, so may I present Marmite Chocolate Returns.

Most Helpful Post

I don't really think I have particularly helpful posts either (on the helpful post front, if somebody spots one called How to fix a Nissan Almera Passenger Side Wing Mirror do let me know). My candidate for this category is also the blog which has had the most visits, it's Anneke Kuyper . On the face of it, it's just a blog of rather lovely pictures and prints I saw in Amsterdam, but apart from her own site (here), you'll be hard pushed to find much of her work elsewhere on the net and I seem to get a regular trickle of visitors to that page still (maybe because I appear quite far up the google list when you type in Anneke Kuyper)

A Post Whose Success Surprised Me

Inaccessible Tongland seemed surprisingly far up the ladder of post visits. Not sure why, it was an ordinary walk to an uncared for ruined church where I had a cuppa in the church yard.

A Post I Didn't Feel got the Attention it deserved

I'm sure they all get the attention they deserve but that's not a reason to cop out on a choice for this category. I'm going to go for Chelsea Thursday - 20:50 .It was posted near the beginning of my blogging on this site before many of you had found me, so it seems like a good opportunity to draw your attention to an exhibit I saw in the Saatchi gallery in London. For a lot of people it sits in that "it's not art" corner of the art world but I found it facinating.

The Post I'm Most Proud Of

Proud is perhaps not the word but one of my favorite blogs is Tea, the Religion of the Art of Life .I usually have an idea about what the next couple of blogs are going to be and I aim for a bit of variety when I consider the order of posting. This blog on the other hand was suggested by a friend, written and posted next - there was an enjoyable bit of surfing for material for it and marks a small break from my travels.

Well that's me back in the North Atlantic again drinking offshore tea from a plastic cup again. Hopefully more posts soons. But just to finish off  here's a picture of a lovely afternoon at Portobello Beach.

Autumnal sweepings

A great big thank you to Val over at Poppy's Place who has given me this award (about a fortnight ago - sorry for being so slow). Pop over and have a look. It's worth going back a couple of months, there's a huge pile of pictures from her recent trip to China.

Spotted these two ducks getting a hand across the road in Kirkcudbright.

Looks like they were of for a small wager on this years annual duck race on the river.

I saved two pounds this year by arriving after the tote had closed.

In Edinburgh the National Museum of Scotland on Chamber Street has opened fully again with some fairly serious rearrangements and improvements, so we went for a wee wander around it. Here's a small and very arbitrary selection of exhibits.

Certainly their leopard is looking a bit more spruced up.

Getting an aeroplane into a confined space like this is a bit of a Chinese puzzle.

A rather delightful vase, engraved by Danish glass maker Per Lutken (I looked him up and nothing else of his on the net looks much like this. There's a chap called Edward Hald has a few things in the case and he looks much nearer to this as far as I can see. Anyone want to have a surf and see what you think). These swallows waiting to fly south are quite appropriate for the time of year.

In the main hall of the museum is an old lighthouse lamp - the lens is cleverly cut for maximum light distribution but I was more impressed by the fact that somewhere in the facets there was always a selection of rainbows.

In the city art centre there was a wonderful exhibition by David Mach (you may remember he appeared in this blog earlier in the year with his match head of Robert Burns - it's about half way down here) Called precious Light it celebrates 400 years of the King James Bible. Downstairs (where photos were allowed) there were three quite brilliant crucifixes made - he made the figures out of coat hangers. I saw a bust made of coat hangers by him in Wolverhampton but the quality of my photo of it is really poor. On the upstairs levels are a large number of excellent collages based on parts of the bible (and a few of his famous match heads). Go here for a better idea. In one hall David and his assistants continue to work on collages - it's good to see how they are produced. Plenty of time to see it yet if you're in Edinburgh - highly recommended- it's on till 16th October.

I'm afraid that the Summer is over in our part of the world already, although Autumn is a season with it's own charms (if we could go straight from Spring to Autumn and back to Spring, I wouldn't complain too much). Still, this being Scotland, the weather can be changeable and Summer made a small return for a few hours while I went for a wander round about Threave Gardens, where I managed to photograph this character. it stopped at my feet for about 30 seconds.

Driving down from Dunoon, I had noticed that the sunset was reflected in mirror like surface of a distant loch. I thought I would stop and try and capture the image at Loch Ken where it's quite easy to get to. When I got there, the surface of the water wasn't as smooth as I had expected........

...........for a reason

Back at work now for a few weeks - time to catch up on a tunes.

Most of you who have heard me sing songs, know my repertoire is mostly of the miserable variety. As you can see, I don't take this approach with the mandolin.