Scotland2005: Last Day in Glasgow

We spent the day just hanging around Glasgow today, sleeping in late and not leaving the city. The day started out nice, with some sunshine and blue skies, and we noticed a lot of stars out last night as we walked home. However it quickly turned to a light Seattle-esque drizzle that lasted all day—despite promises to my mother that we wouldn’t go motorcycle riding anymore this trip.

We tried to take some nice pictures of Glasgow to post on the blog—we really did. But we couldn’t find anything, although the area around the Univesity of Glasgow was nice with some cool gothic buildings. That’s not to say it isn’t a pretty town in its own way—there are some wonderful buildings built in the mid to late 1800s out of carved red sandstone. And the town also is home to a famous architect—Charles Rennie MacIntosh -- and his buildings are all over town—or so we are told, because we only could find one near our hotel.

Like I said before, Glasgow was, and still is, a very industrial city, and the building heritage reflects that as does the population. Following the loss of the football game yesterday, even very late at night, mobs of guys in their kilts with the team jersey, quite drunk, were roaming about, and having fun. Our hotel is right next to the train station and there were huge lines of people headed back upcountry and out to the subs after the game and a night of partying. The amount of litter that was along the major streets around the train station was staggering last night—Tony and I have never seen anything like it, but it was all cleaned up by the time we got up and about today.

It’s a very “gritty” city—lots of dirt on top of the litter, as well as grime. The subway cars were covered with grime and full of litter. The Brits in general have no sidewalk or public litter cans—they tended to attract IRA terrorists in the past—so it makes for a lot of litter in the less upscale parts of town.

We have to give them credit for trying though. Glasgow in the last few years has undergone, or tried to undergo, a transformation of sorts. They’ve been cleaning things up, the economy is moving towards the service sector, and there are a lot of people buying wonderful old buildings and putting trendy shops into them. But it still has those gritty, industrial underpinnings. Edinburgh reminds me in a way of Washington DC, smaller, quieter, and generally cleaner while Glasgow reminds me of a big dirty city like Pittsburgh or New York.

Like New York, it’s a very “late” city, and we ate dinner at 10pm and there were crowds at many of the nice trendy restaurants in the revived part of town and we couldn’t get into our first two choices. It seems like a fun town too, so if I’m making it seem like a place to avoid, that shouldn’t be the case.

We wanted to go to two places and do some shopping today, after taking care of “business”—booking a hotel in Oban, our next stop, and getting train seat reservations. We first started out taking the subway to the Museum of Transport—which we learned about on the hop-on, hop-off tour we took the first day here. The guide said it was a great place to spend the afternoon if you liked anything to do with transportation—trains, busses, autos, and boats. So we put it on our list of places to visit. It was a fair walk in the drizzle from the subway, and Tony started to come down with a chill —probably the after affects of the ride yesterday too. So by the time we got to the museum he was feeling a tad under the weather. It was just as well though; the museum was more of a collection of odds and ends, with not a lot of information on what we were looking at. They did have a few cool cars in the car section, some old Mini-Coopers and a few other oddities—along with a 1970s European Chrysler “Sunbeam”, which looks like every other ‘70s Plymouth hatchback. Well those were odd little cars too I guess.

They did have some cool old “’arley’s” too, and an exhibit on the history of the Glasgow subway (which apparently was once pulled by cables like the San Francisco cable cars, only the cable was a 14 mile loop with a huge engine). They also had a few old trolley and tramcars that were fun to look at. However, I wouldn’t call an exhibit on the “History of Prams” (what the Brits call baby strollers) to be top on the transportation agenda. They even had a modern folding one like you buy at Target for $9.99 in the display.

Tony started to fade, so we figured we’d head back to the Hotel for a bit, get some cold and flu medicine and sit in the sauna and steam room for a while. That seemed to do the trick,(along with lunch at KFC) as it revitalized Tony, and we went out with the Sunday afternoon throngs who were shopping along the pedestrian mall. We enjoyed people watching and doing a little shopping—Tony bought a CD called “Caledonian” which is a group of Scottish tenors. I think it was mainly for the cover of the big burley guys in kilts, but I digress. He also picked up the Scottish soccer team jersey so he can wear it with one of his kilts and be just like the blokes here. He has wanted to get a tattoo done here -- something in Gaelic for “Bear” but we’ve yet to find a place for that -- there is still tonite however.

We’ll leave early tomorrow morning on a train to the town of Oban, which is on the west coast, where we’ve booked a hotel for three nights. This is the jumping off point for the ferries to the Hebredies Islands, as well as other points in the Highlands and we’ll have a car for three days since there is really no public transportation. Our plans include going to the Isle of Mull and out to Iona, where the first Christian’s in Scotland set up an Abbey way back in 500 AD, as well as driving to some castle ruins, and going up to Fort Williams. Fort Williams, which is at the base of Ben Nevins, which is the highest peak in the UK, and the starting point of the Jacobite Steam Train—better known and seen as the train used in the Harry Potter movies as they go to Hogwarts. This is a four-hour excursion, which goes up one of the most spectacular rail routes in the Highlands, and we are looking forward to it.

Unfortunately, small towns such as Oban often don’t have the Internet access that we’ve been used to in Glasgow, Edinburgh and London, particularly for loading up pictures here.

We'll write if we can, but if we can’t you’ll know why. We are due back in Glasgow on Thursday. We’ll spend at least Thursday in Glagow, and then decide where to go from there—either down to London for the weekend, back to Edinburgh, or maybe up to Inverness. We do have to be in London on Sunday, when our rail passes expire, and we fly home a week from tomorrow on Monday the 17th. We’ve been having a great time so far, and we’ve got a week of cool stuff to see and do in a part of the country we’ve not been to before. We hope you are enjoying the travelogue and pictures as much as we are writing and posting them.

One last time, from the Yeeha Internet Cafe in Glasgow.

Gary and Tony