Anniversary trip chapter 1.

Hi Everyone :)

Today's blog post will be about a fantastic trip to a lovely city. We took many pictures and visited so many places, that it would be too much for 1 blog, thus we divide the trip into 3 chapters.

The first chapter will be about the stop that we took. The city where we stopped for a couple of hours is called Dundee, Scotland's fourth largest city, and still like a little town. Maxim found the city more western-style than Aberdeen (Tho I don't really know what made him think that), he enjoyed the quiet streets. The city established itself as an important east coast trading port. Rapid expansion was brought on by the Industrial Revolution, and Dundee was the center of the global jute industry. This, along with its other major industries gave Dundee its epithet as the city of "jute, jam and journalism". The city still wears the mark of industrialization.

Today it is promoted as the "One City, Many Discoveries" in honour of Dundee's history of scientific activities and of the RRS Discovery, Robert Falcon Scott's Antarctic exploration vessel, which was built in Dundee and is now berthed at Discovery Point. (from Wikipedia) We spent like 5 hours in the city while changing buses, and mostly walked around the city. It looks like we managed to cover all the main sightseeing apart form the museums and the botanic garden (and I am really sorry for that we missed it). Here come the pictures. :)

The bus left at 6.30 in the morning, and we got like 4 hours sleep, that is why we look tired, but nothing could stop us :D

This is Dundee's centre, just 2 minutes walk from the bus station.

The only city so far in Scotland where I saw a fountain actually working.

We headed to the University from the bus station through the city centre (literally took us 15 minutes.)

A small park in the University. ( & Maxim in the corner..)

From the Uni, we climbed up to Dundee's landmark and an enduring attraction for visitors and locals...

The route we took went through the Dudhope Park, where this tree can be seen. Yep, those are shoes on the tree.. (The walls with the graffiti are part of the skate-park, so maybe that is why such a tree could be found here.)

As we walked higher and higher, the streets became more quiet, the houses more grandiose and the gardens bigger and better maintained. This is the scenery from around half way up to our destination.

I could not skip this one. Some of the houses have this badge. I tried to look up some reference to this, but couldn't find anything apart from amazon sellers who would like to sell one of these plaque, perhaps, really nothing happened, and this is the indication to move along because there is nothing to see here. Still it was amusing for the first time. :)

And finally we reached our destination: Dundee Law.

It is a plug of an extinct volcano. If you wish to learn more of it, here a link:
https://www.dundeecity.gov.uk/service-area/corporate-services/democratic-and-legal-services/dundee-law

The next 7 pictures meant to be a panorama picture, but khmm I was too  clumsy and couldn't manage to take the panorama picture right, therefore i took several normal ones from the Law. :D

 And the history of the Law. It explains how it was made, its past and present (It was occupied in the Iron age) and how the city has changed since.

An arc indicate the entrance to the Law.

Well, this is true for whole Scotland, that there are temples everywhere. Like this in the middle of the suburb. (A very nice one tho, but still, why are there so many temples in Scotland?)

We accidentally passed by this something. (I don't really know what it is, maybe some sort of bandstand). Anyway it was nice :)

The city is full of hidden pathways and stairs.

This is the gate to the Baxter park. The interesting part is the poster on the gate, stating that some clever dogs may have stupid owners that don't clean up, and for that they can be fined £80.

Pavilion in the park.

3 minutes from Baxter Park there was another park, in where there were 2 artificial lakes.  This is one of them.

And this is the other one. It is bigger, and has an island in the middle. There were swans and ducks in lake. It seemed like a nice spot for a casual boating :)

The other side of the park. This is actually a part of a circular rose garden.

From here we started to go back to the direction of the bus station, but before the station, we went to the harbor (which was again maybe 5 minutes from the bus station).

The harbor is not like in Aberdeen. I mean Aberdeen is a port city, you can see fishing ships and ferries departing and arriving but in Dundee nothing. Instead, they refurbished the area, there are numerous new, nice-looking flats, and market.

This is a crow's nest (lookout point). Obviously it is not a ship, it is on the ground and the caracole staircase also a new one, but the actual lookout point resembles an original one.

And lastly, the waterfront of the city quay. This is a new building, full of restaurants, offices and entertainment.

There were 2 very old ships in front of the city quay building and I thought there were just uhm.. leftover junk, but turned out one is the HMS Unicorn, which is nearly 200 years old and preserved as a museum.. and the other one is the North Carr Lightship, the last remaining lightship in Scotland..

The HMS Unicorn, and unfortunately, I didn't take any picture of the lightship, because i thought what I thought...
If you would like to learn more about the ships, here some useful links.
http://www.frigateunicorn.org/history

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Carr_Lightship

Night Adventures

Hi everyone :)

This adventure happened in early March, not nowadays, that is why the thick clothing, so please don't assume that we are freezing here. :D

Both of us have sweet teeth, and a huge appetite for ice cream, chocolate or basically anything sweet. One cold night, I could not resist the craving for cookies, and I started talking about it to Maxim (apparently for so long) that he himself developed the same feeling for ice coffee. By that time (11 pm), all the surrounding shops were closed, so we decided to take a night adventure (for the first time) to the 0-24 ASDA store which was again a little bit more than an hour walk.

We prepared the essentials, in case we found some good looking ice cream. ( Those spoons pretty much became our regular walking partners. There are 2 sets of them, one in my bag / pocket, one in Maxim's pocket, so we can eat ice cream whenever we found one we would like to taste.

See how happy he looks when he is promised coffee and ice cream.. :D

And of course me too, it was my idea after all :D

Sorry for the hazy picture, WE broke the screen of my phone, which affects the front camera. But here we just closing the front door and we are closer and closer to our desired sweets.

After 1 hour walk, we reached our destination, surprisingly, the store has a 0-24 h McDonald's, what we skipped this time. (They couldn't compete with our home made burgers in taste. )

Inside.. Let the search begin. The store is a 2 storey building, and as big as for instance the Auchan at Óbuda. We have never been here before, so we were curious what new things the store has to offer. (Not much :( ) 

My choice of cookies. They were delicious by the way. :D

Unfortunately the ice cream section and the bakery products were gone. (just to mention, we went there only a couple of days after the snow storm, so maybe that is why the selves were empty)

Maxim's choice was a caramel latte ice coffee (at 1 am :D ).

Even tho we could not find all the things we wanted, it was still fun, we had a great walk and talk during the way back and forth. It was totally worth it. :) 

Hazlehead Park

Hi Everybody :)

Sorry for the long silence. I will catch up with the things that happened with us during these couple of months, but before that, I would like to share with you Today's adventure. The Hazlehead Park..

This is a large public park in Hazlehead area of Aberdeen. Roughly an hour and half walking distance from our home. I have spotted it on the map for a fine time now, but I always thought that area of Aberdeen has nothing special to offer (just like the rest of it). But I have never been more grateful to be mistaken than this time.

Today was started as an average cloudy warmish day in Aberdeen. It happened to be our mutual day off, and as someone who has a very high demand for walks, I insisted on taking a nice walk to somewhere new. (Maxim proposed to take a walk to Aldi just to combine the useful with the pleasurable..)  So, trying to reach an agreement, we decided to go to Lidl to have some ice-cream/cake/snack in order to survive the serious ordeal of taking me out for a walk, then continue our way to Hazlehead park, which is pretty close to the Lidl. So, Maxim prepared the essentials (spoons for the ice cream) and we were off. :)

Just a visual representation of our travel..

This is our treat from Lidl. This and a couple of cheese twists. We always thought that this is a 1-person-cake only and we are doing so great when we split it between us, but today I noticed, it serves 6.. ( It must be the calories that are meant for 6, and not the portions apparently.. )
Unfortunately, there were no suitable ice creams for our taste, but fear not, we went to a different lidl just 4 ours ago to get them. :P

The cheesy twists didn't last long, but we managed to save the cake for the park.

On the way to the park.. We saw a couple of nice houses, and a lot of green spots everywhere..

And that's it, we arrived. First thing we noticed was the flowers. Loads of flowers, with nice flower scent everywhere..
The park is not that big as it is shown on the map, because the majority of the park is a golf club (Of course, what else could it be? ) and divided into smaller sections. Unfortunately the memorial garden and the rose garden were under construction, but the rest was a wonderful experience.



There was a pet corner, which we have not visited, but we heard that they definitely have a donkey.


There was another garden with full of colourful flowers (see pictures) and there was a Maze.. I read somewhere that this is Scotland's first maze, and was opened in 1935.
For those who are not familiar with Maxim's ideas, He is very fond of mazes, He actually would like to build one in his (our) garden for the kids, He has a complete idea how the maze will look like, and honestly, his idea of having an Easter egg hunt in the maze for (with) the kids sounds very entertaining.



Near the park entrance there was a cafe, which was (being Monday morning) full with wives with small children. It was a bit noisy, but otherwise charming place, but we decided to have our cake at a more quiet area where we can have some discussion as well.

I regret not taking a picture about the layout of the park, but maybe next time I won't forget it..

 Here the park in pictures.

This is the rose garden. still a bit grey. :(

I don't really know what this is, just thought it looks nice.

 These were the flowers I was talking about. They were beautiful, and had very rich colors. Probably the yellow ones were my favorites. (Maxim actually did not order them according to his taste, but he says 'there were plenty of lovely flowers'.)

 And a fountain. Interesting thing, the fountains are not working here. We don't really know why it is, we think that maybe they try to save water, but seeing a fountain like this makes me feel sad, like all the joy and life are just passing away from it.

This is already the MAZE. Here Maxim explains to me his plans of how our maze will look like.

 Taking an .. khm.. illegal shortcut..

But no worries, I caught him red handed. :D

Maxim really enjoyed the Maze, though we managed to got lost a couple of times before we found the right way out :D

We loved the colorful benches, the bright  flowers, the nice scent, and pretty much everything in the park, which, by the way, has a Margit Sziget atmosphere, just more compact. 

We will definitely come back another time for a picnic. :D

During our way home, we took another detour to check out a small lake (you can see it on the map). Well, it turned out that the lake is a quarry, and closed down from the public. All we could manage was a picture of the lake.