Austin Museums

We visited two good museums in Austin. One was the Blanton Museum at the University of Texas which had a good amount of contemporary art which I liked and a dash of some other stuff. The pic above and below is a fountain on the vast university grounds and the somewhat infamous UT Tower. Google for UT Tower shooting if you don't know why.

The other museum was the Umlauf Sculpture Garden & Museum. We caught it an hour before closing and it was just enough time to see it all. If it wasn't so hot and muggy then I would have liked to spend some more time there because it's a great garden setting for the sculptures. It'd be a nice relaxing place to hang out in a more favorable temperature. I guess I need to acclimate again to the Texas heat.

Austin Texas

I've been a Texan since I was 12 but I finally visited the Texas Capitol Building during an R&R from Latvia. Austin has a slogan of "Keep Austin Weird" but it really isn't any weirder than any other city I've seen. We looked for the weird and didn't find very much of it except on souvenirs in the shops. I did see one red hat for sale saying "Make Austin Weird Again" which would be more appropriate now. Here's some pics around town and the Capitol.

Meža Kapi - Forest Cemetery

We visited the forest cemetery in Riga on this May 1st holiday. It looks like a great place to rest after you die. It's a grand setting for a cemetery with each grave serving as its own little garden tended to by their loved ones. There's a big military memorial cemetery which was grand in a different way with the Mother Latvia monument and eternal flame.

Stockholm Viking Museum

This is a quick post about the Viking Museum in Stockholm which wasn't there when I lived there. We're in Riga now so we took the Tallink overnight ferry there and back again for the long Easter weekend. It's a cheap way to travel to Stockholm and kind of fun with the shows, bars, buffets, and rooms like the bigger cruise ships. It wasn't what I though of when I first heard about riding on a ferry. First, here's a few pics from the trip to Stockholm.

Random Budapest

Here's random left over bits from walking around mostly on the Pest side of Budapest where the Parliament is and the cute little Budapest Eye. OK, it's not small but it's not as big as the London Eye.

Budapest Museums

Budapest has some great museums like most European cities. It's also where my new favorite artist Victor Vasarely comes from so there's a museum devoted to him. I first noticed his work recently in a Frankfurt museum and it was great so I'll start with that museum. We also visited the Hungarian National Gallery, Museum of Fine Arts, and the Budapest National Museum. The Kuntshalle Contemporary Art Museum was redoing their exhibits so there wasn't much open for the price. They pretty much discouraged us from buying tickets so we didn't. There's just a few pics of the exterior here.

Budapest Városliget Park and Vajdahunyad Castle

Városliget Park or City Park is a wonderful place with Vajdahunyad Castle. I really love this castle because it's an intentional mashup of old styles.

Vajdahunyad Castle was built in 1896 as part of the Millennial Exhibition which celebrated the 1,000 years of Hungary since the Hungarian Conquest of the Carpathian Basin in 895. The castle features copies of several landmark buildings from different parts the Kingdom of Hungary, especially the Hunyad Castle in Transylvania (now in Romania). As the castle contains parts of buildings from various time periods, it displays different architectural styles: Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque. Originally, it was made from cardboard and wood, but it became so popular that it was rebuilt from stone and brick between 1904 and 1908.