Edinburgh and the Turner Watercolour Exhibition

Well, yesterday was Burns Supper day and I was so busy at a Burns Supper which was hosted by Duncan and his lady Alex – that I didn’t manage to do a Robert Burns blogpost, nor did I take any photos, we were too busy eating haggis pakora for our starter – a fusion of Scottish and Indian food which is very popular nowadays. Then the traditional haggis, turnips and potatoes (haggis, neeps and tatties) and cranachan for dessert. Lovely!

At the end of last week we were in Edinburgh visiting the lovely Turner watercolour exhibition which is only on in January at the National Gallery, it was quite busy. You can read about it here. It is of course a free exhibition but it’ll only be on until the end of January.

You can see a lot of Turner watercolour images here. You really have to get up close to them to see the details.

I have to say though that the gallery’s cafe has gone right downhill from what it used to be. I was seduced by a piece of coffee and walnut gateau, I love those flavours, but so often with these things it looked a lot better than it tasted. Admittedly it was thick with buttercream and I’m not the biggest fan of the stuff, too cloying for my taste really, but this lot somehow managed to seem oily too.

It came on a paper plate!! I really object to that and also the only type of fork available was a wooden one which had a very woody smell, so I had to make sure I wasn’t breathing in as I put the fork up to my mouth. When I moaned to Duncan about it later he thought that it was supposed to be an improvement on using plastic cutlery as the wood biodegrades. That’s true I suppose but why they have to have disposable plates and cutlery is beyond me, it’s not as if the cafe is cheap. The name is Victor and Carina Contini which I’m told has some sort of Valvona and Crolla connection.

Worse than all that though was that we noticed that there were drips of coffee down the outside of Jack’s mug, the mug was actually ceramic, not paper, but it seems that they aren’t washing the mugs properly. Why didn’t we complain? We should have, especially as I would hate to think that foreign tourists might think that is normal service in Scotland. Mind you the people working in the cafe were foreign, presumably from some country where washing mugs properly is a difficult skill to master.

2 thoughts on “Edinburgh and the Turner Watercolour Exhibition

  1. Your museum cafe experience is like the one we had at the Philadelphia Art Museum. We once went in the morning and saw empty beer cans in the fountain in front of the museum! Remember the steps in the Rocky movie? Right at the top of those steps! I would have thought they would have sent someone around the grounds before they opened to check for trash, etc. I guess our standards are too high. I can’t remember, but I think I mentioned the beer cans to someone inside the museum.

    • Joan,
      I bet the people in the museum just thought – it’s not my job to clean up!

      Right outside that cafe are the Princes Street gardens and I remember years ago they were shut so the Queen could look around them and SHE had to complain about cans lying about in the gardens. You would have thought they would have made sure it was pristine for her.

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