The plan is to meet up with a friend in Scotland—we both enjoy the wonderful journey of flavours and aromas of single malt scotch whisky and have a special fondness for the Islay distillers, so the Isle of Islay is our main destination.
We meet up in London and take the train together to Glasgow—time to catch up with each other. Turns out we’re travelling on a bank holiday weekend, and the trains are full, including hordes of chanting football fans, but in the end, we catch one with a couple of available seats. It goes to Edinburgh, then we switch trains to get to Glasgow.
We get off at the Queen Street Railway Station in Glasgow, which is right at St. George Square, a large plaza with sculptures and surrounded by old buildings. People here are friendly and helpful, it seems. Random passers-by offer help to find our way and are happy to just have a chat. They give us wrong directions to our airbnb, but thankfully google maps knows better and we find the right bus to take us to the Shawlands. People on the bus are amused by our figuring out how everything works here and our different accents, so they chat us up. To be honest, I think they have a laugh at our expense.
Shawlands is a neighbourhood in the south of Glasgow, and while our place is in a quiet residential area, the main stretch with restaurants and shops is just a short walk away. It seems to be a working class neighbourhood, not terrible but also not special in any way. We have what we need and will explore Glasgow for a few days.
The next day, we go to Glasgow city centre. The architecture here is, of course, so different from Bucharest, and I am intrigued and excited to walk around and take it all in. There are old churches, turrets, towers, arches scattered around, interspersed with modern and plain buildings. The architecture is a thousand-fold more interesting than in Vancouver.
The city centre’s large pedestrian zone is packed with people. I see an Apple store in an old building and find the contrast funny. There are pubs seemingly at every corner, filled with locals. The drinking culture here is sadly quite unhealthy: the emphasis is on quantity, and getting drunk is the main objective… not just for students it seems.
We explore a whisky bar and have a look at their selection—of course, the whisky is what brought us here in the first place. Our approach to whisky is drastically different from the common drinking culture in this country: we pour the spirit into snifter glasses, let it breathe, smell the aroma and observe how it changes with time in the glass; we enjoy the taste and compare our personal tasting notes and experiences with the spirit. It may take hours to finish one dram, and a pub or a bar are not very conducive to this process. Are we pretentious? Not really, we just know what we like and enjoy it in our own way.
Of course, we go into every whisky specialty shop we come across, comparing the prices of products we know with Vancouver prices and discovering many whiskies that are unavailable in Canada.
The next day, we explore our own neighbourhood a little, including Queen’s Park. The parks here are not as manicured as in Canada or Romania; the Brits let large patches of grass grow long and encourage wildflower meadows, everything is somewhat more natural. I quite like it, and large rhododendron bushes are in bloom. We chat with an older park employee (or volunteer?) about the communal tennis courts, which have to be booked in advance and soon will have to be paid for… that’s different from Vancouver, too.
The poet’s rose garden is not in full bloom yet, although a couple of older rose varieties have flowers already. Of course, I have to stop and smell the roses. Plaques name Scottish poets, and a center stone displays a poem which can only be read by circling the stone a few times. I enjoy the respite from the dirty city while we sweat in the sun. We were expecting much cooler weather and brought jeans, sweater, jackets… no shorts. Who would have thought that we have so much luck with the weather: sun with temperatures in the twenties for our entire time in Scotland. Wonderful.
Well I am sorry to hear that is was dirty. The pics look quite clean.
A few hours over one dram!! mmmmmmhhhh!!!
C
I will never be a heavy drinker, that much is clear 😉
From BC to GB. Nice! A.
Well Dee Glad to see you are still exploring, I personally found Glasgow a dirty city overall on my visit many years ago however as you have found the architecture across all of the UK is truly superb & very diverse, steeped in layers of history in every corner of the land, you certainly did luck out with the weather the gods were definitely on your side.
Oh yes, I whole-heartedly agree with the city being dirty! I wouldn’t go back, and you’ll see in my next post that I’m recommending to go to Edinburgh instead of Glasgow. I still didn’t want to tear it down too hard right from the get-go…