Day 16 – Glasgow

George Square (Glasgow)

Steve left for his morning flight back to the U.S. and so Jeanne and I are on our own once again. We have been very pleasantly surprised by Glasgow. It is the largest city in Scotland but it is pretty well devoid of tourists, or at least ones speaking a different language. You hear a lot of French, Italian, etc. in Edinburgh but nothing other than English here. Glasgow has a reputation as a blue collar city with a rough edge, and you can see hints of that, but by and large we found it open and inviting. It is also a young city with three large universities and a thriving music and pub scene. Glasgow has a very nice pedestrian zone downtown formed by Buchanan and Sauchiehall (pronounced Sucky-Hall) streets. The Scots here are very friendly but also very hard to understand. I can understand about every other word and when they tell me the price of something, I can almost never understand it. Here is one good example. We went to dinner at one pub which was full, so the girl told us to try the Butterfly and Peg which was just up the street. It took me a couple of seconds to realize that Peg is how she pronounces Pig.

Tall Ship (Riverside Museum)

We tried to have a relaxing kind of day and pretty much succeeded. We took the Hop-On Hop-Off tour bus around the city and stopped at the Riverside Museum and the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum. Pubic museums in Glasgow are free so you really can’t complain about what you see. The Riverside Museum is dedicated to transportation and is located on the River Clyde, which used to be the site of a large shipbuilding industry. They have one of the five surviving tall ships built in Glasgow docked at the port.

Kelvingrove Art Museum

We toured the Kelvingrove Museum and I would have to give it an A+ for the building but about a C for content. They have a large collection of Scottish painters who are largely unknown to us.

Dinner tonight was in a local pub watching soccer on TV with everyone else.