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.