“Oh what a beautiful morning, oh what a beautiful day” Glasgow has exactly one day a year of sunshine, and today was it!
Fortified by a fine breakfast I boarded the bus for downtown, and being a trusty soul bought into the driver’s suggestion of buying the day pass for 5.40 pounds, instead of going for the 1.85 pound single ride. I was now armed to move around Glasgow like a native.
For starters I walked from Merchant Square (where the old warehouse district was located), to George Square, which is monument central in Glasgow (Sir William Scott and all the usual suspects). There I boarded the tourist bus, with the intention of taking one tour around before selecting a few suitable places to get down and explore.
Glasgow was the port where a lot of the merchandises came to Scotland from Europe and the Americas, and for reasons that are not completely clear to me it soon became the main port of entry for tobacco from the New World (maybe Scot emigrants created a tobacco monopoly in America, and of course favored their Motherland with their trade). Andrew Carnegie did the same with the trade of steel with Europe, so in the late 1800s an early 1900s Glasgow was a very important industrial center with lots of smoke stacks spewing soot into the air out of the many factories, train building shops, and shipyards. The dominant wind in Glasgow blows from the west, parallel to the Clyde River (where most of industry was concentrated), so the city became naturally divided into an Eastside, where most of the old monuments and government offices were located and where pollution was nasty, and a Westside where the gentlefolks and students preferred to live upstream of the nasty air. Needless to say, the University of Glasgow was located on the Westside. But I diverge from the thread of my story.
My tour first went to the Eastside, where the Royal Infirmary and the Cathedral are located (no wonder so many people died of pulmonary complications). The Cathedral was established by Saint Mungo (aka St. Kentiigern), who moved down the Clyde from the Highlands in the 6th Century, and is much venerated by Catholics and Protestants throughout Scotland. We also saw a very pretty mini Big Ben with a bright blue face on the clocks. Pretty, until you learn that it was there to mark the time when the executions were carried out (a super popular public spectacle in the 17th Century) and was surrounded by pikes where the heads of the executed were put in public display; immediately afterward the public market would take place, full of gaiety and fun.
We then drove along the Clyde, which has been transformed into a clean waterway, with new gleaming steel buildings owned by financial corporations replacing the old warehouses and heavily polluting enterprises. There are many modern sport complexes, theaters, and museums along the Clyde, and I chose the Museum of Transport, at the place where the Kelvin River joins the Clyde, as my first stop. Ronnie would have loved it! They had old and middle-aged cars on display, such as the Anglia that my family had when I was 10 years old, and the same was true of motorcycles, bicycles, locomotives, train cars, and boats. One of the prime exhibits is a tall ship, with square rigging, where I saw one of the techs removing some of the old caulking and then proceeding to renew the caulking with oakum and tar! Cool!
My next stop was the University of Glasgow, which was established in the 18th Century and could be the poster child of an old university, not unlike Harvard in the United States. Turns out that Lister, the inventor of carbolic spray and asepsis, was actually a professor at the University of Glasgow, and so was Bill Thompson, a physicist who made great advances in the science of thermodynamics. He became so prominent that the King made him a lord, which meant that he had to choose a geographic name for his lordshipness. The Clyde River had already been taken by Lord Clyde, so Bill though he would chose the name of the small river that ran through the university, the Kelvin River, and so Bill became Lord Kelvin, of temperature scale fame.
The University of Glasgow is also where one of my favorite authors, James Alfred Wight (aka James Herriot), studied to become a veterinarian, so I felt a certain link to the old buildings. Of course now there is a new School of Veterinary Medicine farther to the west, so I though I would use my day pass to take a bus there and check it out. Not! Turns out my day pass is good for one bus company, but not for the other that serves the city. There went my trusty investment on a day pass! Frustrated I changed my plans and went instead to the Botanical Garden, which because of the sunny day was a perfect day for people watching because everyone was at the garden taking the sun.
I stopped at a student eatery for lunch, which consisted on two slices of haggis and two slices of black pudding, smothered in batter, and deep fried in fish-and-chips style. You then add salt and vinegar and presto, you have a delicious Scottish lunch.
I very much enjoyed Glasgow, but finally came the time for me to resume my trip, and after using only for the second time my infamous day pass I caught the bus back to the hotel, took my brave little Fiat, and an hour later came back to the same lodge where I had first landed when I came to Scotland. It felt like I was home. I celebrated by going to the pub to have a pint of Tennent Caledonian beer. Now, today is Friday, and the bar will be hopping all night, but at 5 pm it was only the early crowd of workers and young idlers that was there to get a couple of beers before heading home. Scots are very friendly, and I immediately made friends with a young man and his friends. The only problem is that I cannot understand a word of what they are saying due to the brogue and the “young speech” full of modernisms.
Here is to a great trip through a beautiful land full of friendly people!
Finis
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