Massive Christmas Update: Glasgow

So while I have internet back, it's about time I make an update on my life post-finals.

My last exam was Thursday, and I went to my friend Katharine's in Glasgow on Saturday. While there I pretty much recharged from the semester. There was a very large park across the street from her house. I'm bad at estimating areas, but to walk around the perimeter took me about an hour, and it had on the grounds a pond with pavilion and boating dock, walled garden, 'glen walks' that went through some heavier forest and around a waterfall from the man-made dam, a few large open fields, and a couple sets of children's playgrounds. Right next to the park was a train station, so a three-minute walk from her house and twenty-minute train ride got me right into the city centre, very convenient for visiting Glasgow. On my last two days I even took the train trip by myself, AND figured out the Glasgow Underground (a very simple loop with about a dozen stations).

I went to the Glasgow Museum of Modern Art, shopped a bit in the pedestrian area of Sauchiehall/Buchanan streets. I visited the museum of Kelvingrove, what used to be a huge mansion on a hillside in Glasgow, on the north side not the city centre---Kelvingrove was a bit of a mixed bag, by which I mean that the organisation was lacking. There were two open areas, one on the west end that had the taxidermy displays, and the one on the east had some really weird sculpture, including heads hanging from the ceiling with a range of emotions on their faces.

Right near Kelvingrove was the Museum of Transport, which included pretty much every range of transportation used since the invention of the steam engine---and the working model of the steam engine was so cool I could have watched it go for hours. I don't think I'd ever seen one before. The displays had: horsedrawn carriages, including gypsy 'caravans' (modern-day caravans are our RVs/trailers). Old cars, especially interesting because few were American and most were makes I'd never seen before. Some trams (still double-decker) back in the 1930's, before they had buses. Trains, which were boring except for the platform view of the engines. A large room of model ships, pretty boring except for the warships. And some bicycles and motorcycles, apparently the first bicycle is credited to a Scotsman!

Katharine's family was warm and inviting and I learned a lot of things about Scotland, some of it from her younger brothers who are both crazy about rugby. Their TV got a lot of channels, so it was pretty much my first experience with British television that wasn't set to a sports channel so that the pub-goers could watch the evening football match. I helped decorate the house for Christmas, and was asked a lot of questions about life in America. Her 16-year-old brother asked, "Is living in America like Laguna Beach?"
It was pretty cute.