By now I'm sure there are only a few of you remaining - you may have noticed that my semi-slacking off turned to full on abandonment of the blog. Essays are to blame for this - I have spent a good deal of the past month holed up in various libraries and coffee shops trying to churn out an annotated bibliography and two 4,000 word essays. But, as of yesterday, I am free for the semester - so I figured it was time to fill you in on what's been going on in my life. This will be a little briefer than usual, only because I'd like to go back to telling you about what's currently going on in my life rather than what happened a few weeks earlier.
I think I left off in early November, so let's start with Glasgow:
We took a two day trip to Glasgow, staying overnight at a hostel, although this was probably unnecessary because the 45 min train ride is so cheap, that it would have been less expensive to go home and sleep in my own bed and then come back the next day. Oh well. LOTS to do in this city, so here's a quick rundown of the highlights:
1. The Cathedral. I'll let the photos speak for themselves:
2. Shopping. Glasgow is known for its shopping - much better than Edinburgh. I didn't really do any, due to my student-sized budget, but we did walk around the nice pedestrian shopping streets downtown like this one:
And indoor malls/arcades like this:
3. Kelvingrove Museum. This museum is a bit of a hodgepodge, but in the best way possible. One half is themed "Life" - much like the ROM, it has animal skeletons and old suits of armour - and the other half is "Art," which pretty much speaks for itself. Their collection included a few impressionist works which was neat, and a very cool exhibition on Charles Rennie Mackintosh, the Glasgow born designer and architect (more on him later). The museum itself is in a beautiful building located in beautiful Kelvingrove Park:
4. The University. Located in the West end overlooking Kelvingrove Park, the Uni has a spectacular view and some pretty spectacular buildings such as this one:
I also found a plaque commemorating Glaswegian and alum James McGill - it kind of neat that all the old Canadian universities (Queens, McGill, U of T) are all based on the Scottish model:
5. Charles Rennie Mackintosh. This Arts & Crafts/Art Nouveau designer is all over Glasgow - though we sadly missed the chance to take a tour of the inside of the Glasgow School of Art, we did have tea in the Willow Tearoom, one of several tearooms he designed in the city:
6. The Burrell Collection. A bus ride away from the city centre, this museum houses the personal collection of Sir William Burrell, a wealthy industrialist who bought artifacts from all over the world - everything from Egyptian carvings to elaborate tapestries to Chinese vases to Degas painting.
7. The Barras. This market was closing down by the time we got there, but normally there are all sorts of things for sale - antiques, books, posters, clothing. Hopefully we'll get to go back and see it in full swing.
8. The Weather. Less of a highlight and more of a nuisance. We were nearly drenched Saturday night while looking for a restaurant in the West End - luckily we managed to borrow an umbrella from the Glasgow Hilton (I asked if they had any for sale while stopped for directions, and he just gave one to us). Sunday morning we faced hail with a tiny tiny amount of snow, followed by an afternoon of ten minute downpours every half hour on Sunday (lucky we had the umbrella). Maybe it was just that weekend, but the Glaswegian weather seemed much more inconsistent than Edinburgh.
Overall, Glasgow gets two thumbs up - most museums are free, there's lots to do, and restaurants are good and plentiful.
On the flipside of Glasgow, there is Newcastle. Early in December we popped down to check out this city (only an hour or so away by train), but for the most part we were fairly disappointed. Here are the lowlights:
1. Segedenum. This Roman fort used to mark the end of Hadrian's Wall. Sadly, not enough survived to make Segedenum worth seeing. Since some of the wall bases are still there (barely sticking out of the ground), they've filled in the remaining rocks so that you can see the outline of the fort from a silly looking tower sticking out of the museum. They've also reconstructed a Roman Bath house, though we weren't really sure why - as you can see below, the links to any original bathhouse that may have existed at this site are pretty tenuous. Even the nearby chunk of Hadrian's wall was disappointing - though they've tried to make up for that by building a reconstruction next to it. Overall, too many reconstructions to make it worthwhile. That being said, the nearby Wallsend metro station has signs in Latin in honour of the Romans, which is sorta neat.
2. Almost no restaurants. Or at least not in the main shopping area. Though the city comes alive at night, with girls in minimal clothing and heels tumbling out of cabs at every turn (the Geordies are known for their resistance to the cold, apparently), it took us an hour to find a restaurant that wasn't a pub filled with rowdy men watching the football game. Though the one we ended up going to was delicious, you'd think an "up and coming" city like Newcastle supposedly is would have more than a few decent restaurants within walking distant of the shopping areas...
3. NO NEWCASTLE BROWN ALE - seriously. We couldn't find it on tap anywhere (maybe it only exists in bottles), but when we finally settled on a bar, they didn't even have the bottled version. Come. On.
There were some good things. The weather was perfect. The Castle of Newcastle was cool (from the outside at least - it's really only a small section of the original castle, so we didn't want to pay to go in). St Christopher's Cathedral was also quite nice. The bridges are cool. LOTS of shopping in Newcastle (apparently on the edge of town they have the biggest mall in the UK - we did not venture out to see it), but for the most part nothing that you couldn't get in Glasgow.
Overall, a little letdown by Newcastle - however, we may give it another shot and go back when the Hadrian's wall bus tour is running, as apparently this takes you to nearby sections of the wall which are more interesting to look at the Segedenum's pile of rocks.
Sadly, the weekend held more disappointments in store for us. The next day was St Andrew's Day - St Andrews is the patron saint of Scotland, so there were supposed to be a bunch of free events around the city. Most of them ended up being pretty kid focussed - we couldn't even find a pub which was hosting St Andrews celebrations - we had high hopes for haggis and some piping, but in the end the bar we went to was out of haggis and the piper had gone home - by ten at night. However - we did get to go to the Zoo for free. And though we had to wait in line for 45 min in below 0 temperatures (cold for Scotland), we did get to see the penguins! For those who have not tried it, watching penguins can redeem any disappointing weekend - especially when said penguins slip and slide as they try to climb out of the water because the ledge of their pool is icy. Sadly, we missed the penguin parade, which happens every day at two and involves the penguins parading around the zoo outside of their pen... Lilah, I think we need to witness this!
So, other than those major occasions I've mostly been student-ing. We went to a rugby game a few weeks ago, which was really fun - rugby is not nearly as hard to follow as I thought it was. There's a neat Christmas village set up in the Princes Street Gardens - a German market and a Highland market with lots of good food and neat Christmas knick knacks, plus rides which I was too scared to go on, and a skating rink that I was too cheap to pay for (9 pounds for skate rentals and an hour of ice time!). I also started my part-time job - I'm working at a Charity Fundraising Consultant's office doing secretarial work - mostly mail merges which require me to spend several hours a week typing up British addresses, which, unlike Canada and the US, follow no set pattern. I'm always sending things to place like "George House, Greenfields Toll, Renfrew, Meadowshire" and on and on and on - even the postal codes are super inconsistent. Though I have addressed letters to charitable foundations at Buckingham Palace - and to David and Victoria Beckham's Charitable Foundation. Woo hoooo....
The real woo hoo is that tomorrow I leave for PARIS! I'll try to blog at least once while I'm there - coming back on the 29th just in time for Hogmanay (Scottish New Year's Eve). Actually, I'd better get packing - but hopefully another update is not too far away!
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