Our plan was Edinborough (or Edinburgh), to take our rental car the 45 miles and spend the rest of the day walking the city and the castle. Once again, our U.S. sleep habits intervened, and we rolled downstairs around 10 am. There, our hosts Linda and Mary took inordinate glee in their preparation of a traditional "Scottish" breakfast, consisting of eggs, potato pancakes, sausage, bacon, stewed tomatos, beans, toast, juice, tea, and fruit pudding.
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| A very hearty Scottish breakfast! |
When speaking with Linda's husband John, we heard that the Edinborough trip, while originally estimated at 45 minutes, would really take around 3 hours with construction and traffic. Instead of opting for the gridlock trip, and because the weather still looked suspect after yesterday's very wet day, we decided to head back into Glasgow on the train. Mary walked as we waddled, post-Scottish-breakfast, to the train station about 3 blocks from her home. Round-trip tickets from Greenfaulds back into Glasgow's Queen Station were £4.20 for the two of us, and we made record time heading into the city.
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| Tabitha the Tiger (our travel companion) made it to Glasgow as well. |
We started our walking tour in George Square, and wandered into Glasgow's City Chambers, where we gate-crashed an exhibition/conference on Historic Glasgow and James threatened to don Viking armor for a unique photo opportunity. From there, we headed east towards Buchanan street, the main walking (and shopping) street in Glasgow. After Erin successfully used her Starbucks giftcard in one of many, many Starbucks' locations in the city, we entered one of Glasgow's free museums, the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA), where we saw some of the more interesting art exhibits we've had the pleasure of seeing so far. After exiting the GoMA (which is as much fun to say as it is to type), we headed north up to Glasgow's Concert Hall, also the site of one of Glasgow's many, many block-spanning malls.
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| The City Chambers - it was built in 1882 and is still in use. |
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| The GoMA - one of our first stops in Glasgow. |
A note on Glasgow - there are quite a few block-spanning, multi-level shopping complexes, but it's more accurate to describe the whole of Sauchiehall Street and its continuation into Buchanan Street as one enourmous, nearly never-ending mall. The citizens of Glasgow certainly did, and nearly every store one could imagine keeps residence on its pedestrian-only march. We opted to stay out of the more expensive stores - or most of them - and restricted our spending to postcard stamps, a light lunch, and sodas. A note on British prices - the prices here are in "pounds" or the symbol £, and while we see prices that
seem similar - a bottle of Diet Coke for £1, for example - we cannot forget that the available exchange rate is £1 for $1.65. Not terrible, if you pretend you are visiting an airport or a sporting event, but the small price differences do add up. That said, we did end up buying a two-liter bottle of lemonade for £.18 at the Tesco - perhaps prices are as varied here as they are in the states. And, Erin would mention, we did make a special side trip to allow James to visit Britain's largest toy-store chain, Hamleys, where James did his best rendition of "Chopsticks" on the floor keyboard.
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| The giraffe cost nearly 3000 pounds! |
We also found time, amidst nearly five hours of street wandering, to visit The Lightouse, another free museum a little off the beaten path that James insisted on visiting, dragging Erin down a somewhat sketchy-looking alleyway in the process. The Lighthouse is an exhibition space in the former Glasgow Herald Building, featuring the Mackintosh Centre's contribution to the history of architecture design. The aptly named Lighthouse is also famous for its city views, one only accessible via a sixth-floor elevator, and the other only available after climbing seven-stories up a helical staircase. In our case, both views were well-won, and we were able to see the city we had only imagined during yesterday's pouring rain.
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| The spiral staircase at the Lighthouse! |
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| The top of the Lighthouse, with the city of Glasgow in the background. |
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| Some of the art inside the Lighthouse - very modern and colorful. |
We descended The Lightouse, and headed further south on Buchanan Street until we hit Clyde Street, on the border of the River Clyde. From there, we turned back north to finish up our city walk at the University of Strathclyde, where James talked our way into the Strathclyde Student Union to avoid the worst of the rain. Once the rain had let up enough, we headed back to the Queen Street Station to catch our train, with the assistance of a helpful conductor. Once back at Mary's house, we enjoyed a meal of Beef Pie and vegetables, made specially for Mary by her local butcher and thoroughly finished by the three of us.
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| The River Clyde - before the rain. |
