Glasgow - Wow!

This morning, we headed out around 9:30 to catch a train to Glasgow. When we arrived at Waverly Train Station, we found that Prince Charles and Camilla were about to arrive. After grabbing out tickets, we checked the time for our train and boom! There were Charles & Camilla hopping off the Royal Train. They came around and chatted with a few people in the crowd and we were a stone's throw away. It was so random, but cool to see them live and in person!

Next up, we took the 50-minute train to Glasgow, arriving at the Queen Street Station. We weren't out of the train station 5 minutes when we were both like, "whoa! now this is a cool town!" and lamented not staying in Glasgow and day-tripping to Edinburgh. The energy, vibe and overall feeling of Glasgow is much more our speed. There were lots of different types of people, whereas Edinburgh felt much more homogeneous. Further, it is the financial capital of Scotland, so there were a lot of P.I.B.'s ("People-In-Black") - the stock exchange and major banks are headquartered there. What's funny is somehow we got it in our heads that Glasgow was a super-industrial, gritty, blue-collar town; boy, we were off-base on that - lots of interesting-looking people...as well as the 'pretty people.'

We started out by heading to The Lighthouse - a building designed by Charles Rennie Macintosh, who is kind of akin to Gaudi in Barcelona here in Glasgow. You can do a tour of just the houses, buildings and whatnot that he designed. We visited the Six Cities Design Festival exhibit in Glasgow, as well (housed at The Lighthouse), and then looked at some of the other exhibits. This venue also got me excited to go back to the Pompidou in Paris - Jill didn't make it there on her first trip to Paris, and the displays in Glasgow reminded me of a mini-Pomp. Lot's of modern, mixed media, 3-D art and design works.

From there we attempted to go to one of the main attractions - the Glasgow School of Art - designed and founded by C.R. Macintosh = but found them closed for 1 week for repairs :( So, we ate our Marks & Spencer grab-and-go lunch on the school's steps, and then went on to see a historical site: The Tentement House. This house was inhabited by a woman from 1911 - 1965, and then she was hospitalized for 10 years and the contents remained untouched. It wasn't a slum or anything like that - just a historical perspective on life through the two World Wars, and general lower-middle-class lifestyle of the time.

Glasgow offered up a really amazing Whiskey bar that was a destination - The Pot Still. Frank Murphy, our bartender, was well-versed in the 300+ whiskeys and based on Jill's love of Maker's Mark, and her dislike of super-peety flavors, he offered up 5 different whiskeys for her to smell, and from that she selected one. I also tried one that was a little sweeter (he helped me too, based on my overall dislike for whiskey, bourbon, scotch..) and after trying it, I wimped out and Jill had to finish mine too. She had hoped to try a second one from her lot...but, alas, after those two, (and the one that she sampled at a different pub) a good walk was in order. Frank was extremely helpful and better than any tour we could've gone on; further, the Secretary of the local Whiskey club had popped in to confirm this evening's tasting, so the three of them talked a lot about the process of making the different varieties of malt whiskey (what we call Scotch) in Scotland.

















Charles & Camilla, oh my!; Glasgow, way more colorful and fun to look at than Edinburgh! Shots of the whiskey bar experience, Jill being schooled by the bartender and the secretary of the local Whiskey Society who had popped in; condiment bowl for Julie :) ; a few shots from the Tenement House; various shots from the design-focused Lighthouse (including a Jill-self-portrait which she was quite pleased with); finally, a little graffiti...what a sad little sack!