museums and rain

the next stop on our scottish adventure was glasgow. why glasgow? i'm not really sure. for the rest of our cities we chose them because we knew people. but when we realized we had a little more time to travel than we thought, we figured we might as well see another city! and that is how we chose glasgow. somebody may have said something about it once, and we decided to go. end of story.

we arrived by bus from edinburgh. only an hour and a half, not bad at all. when we arrived we pulled out the directions i had from our couchsurfer and were all set to go. except we didn't know where the metro was.. the first step. we went to the information desk at the bus station and asked for directions. let me tell you now just how difficult the scottish accent is to understand. really really difficult. so we didnt really understand what the man said. just that we could go in either direction because we were in between two stops. other than that, we were on our own.
luckily, once we made it to the metro, our couchsurfer had given us excellent directions to find his place. we soon found out just how friendly the scottish are though because when we were getting pretty close we paused just to make sure we hadn't messed up, and a man who had noticed he'd been on the metro with us offered us some help. getting help in this country was never ever an issue.

anyways, we arrived at our couchsurfer's (paul's) flat and were immediately welcomed in and offered some tea. which we were able to add whiskey too (i guess whiskey was invented in scotland.. so was some other cool stuff, like antiseptic surgery or something..). we chatted for a bit and then he headed out for a run while we got some time to rest until dinner.
he made us a delicious pasta dinner and we drank the french cote du rhone wine that chloe and i had provided.. from edinburh haha. what? we couldn't bring any liquids on the flight!

after dinner he took us on a walk to check out the university of glasgow. i was really jealous that lyon 2 wasn't nearly as pretty as this university.

we also got to walk through a beautiful jardin.

and a cool view. i really like finding the views in every city.

we called it a night after our little tour because we didn't want to tire ourselves out too much when we still had over half our trip left.. plus, chloe was starting to get a little sick.

we started day two in glasgow a little later than we had initially planned because chloe was sick.. and we were hoping the rain that we had woken up to would disappear by the time we were ready to go.. it didn't. it was a good thing there were plenty of museums for us to see because it kept us out of the rain and we were able to take lots of breaks when we wanted them.
we started with the huntarian art gallery which featured mr. and mrs. mackintosh. it was pretty interesting, but not my favorite museum ever. i liked a door that led to outside though.. that you would die if you stepped out of..

because it was still raining by the time we were ready for lunch, and we had planned on having our usual picnic, we had to search for a dry place to eat. luckily, we remembered the place on the university campus that paul had shown us the night before where part of harry potter had apparently been filmed (just to continue the theme of the trip of course..)

next we walked through kelvin grove park in the rain. it was really pretty and kind of disappointing that we had to carry an umbrella the whole time.

we finally made it to the kelvingrove museum where we were able to escape the rain.. oh yea, and see some cool stuff. and have a little fun in what was probably the kid's section ;)

i also had a major case of the hiccups most of the time we were there, which chloe was of course laughing at me about. but it was even funnier when some random guy said 'boo' jokingly to "scare" me so i could get rid of my hiccups. maybe the group effort would make them go away?! nope. too bad haha.

when we had had our fill of the museum we made our way to the cottiers theater, though we only checked out the outside.

on our way back to paul's place before dinner, we investigated the inside of a church that had been turned into a bar/club. how creative!

for dinner we went to the 78. a cool bar that has good cheap food and some reggae music to go along with it.

after dinner paul helped us come up with directions so we could get to the airport. we were all set to go.. and then we mentioned we were using ryanair, which meant we had directions to the WRONG airport. whoops. that coulda been bad. so he gave us new directions. awesomeee.

the next day paul woke us up enough to say goodbye before he took off for work, and we got up a bit later. a late start, but not as late as we thought it would be since chloe was still feeling under the weather. our plan was to ditch our bags at the bus station in one of the lockers and then go see some more sights before catching a bus to the airport. along the way, we stopped for lunch on some steps. then we continued.. probably another 50 feet before we stopped again. this time we had stopped to watch a bagpipe/drum ensemble because they sounded pretty cool. we even donated some money! (this would come back to haunt us later..)

we finally made it to the bus station and got ourselves a locker so we wouldn't have to carry our heavy bags all day. then we looked at the map and what we wanted to accomplish. turns out we had already seen the outside of the glasgow royal concert hall. check. so we headed to check out the glasgow cathedral/necropolis. of course we had some trouble getting ourselves turned in the right direction at the beginning (ok, i think this was mostly my fault), but luckily, the scottish are super nice and it didn't take long before some guy noticed we looked lost and helped us with directions.
but the cathedral and necropolis were pretty cool. though half of the inside of the church had been taken over by tourist stuff which i thought was a little disappointing.

next up we headed to the people's palace, winter gardens, and the doulton fountain.

i almost fell asleep in the winter gardens because it was so warm and i was tired. and we ended up making a friend with one of the men who was working there because he joked about us practically napping and then was telling us about his trip to the states. super friendly scottish people, remember? though sometimes hard to understand :/
we took a bus back to the bus station because it would have been a ridiculously long walk and we just weren't up to it.

we grabbed our stuff and got on the appropriate bus to take us to glasgow prestwick airport. it was a double decker (like many buses in scotland) and so we sat at the very front of the top level so that we could have the best view possible. we got to see beautiful green countryside with sheep and cows!

this is when things started going wrong. we missed our stop. yes. the airport. how is this possible, you might ask? well. here's how: nobody else was getting off, so we were confused. also, since when does an airport bus drop you off across the street? and since when is it not the final destination? exactly. you might have messed it up too.
we realized pretty quickly that we had screwed up and so headed downstairs at the next stop and verified with the driver that we had indeed missed our stop. he must have thought we were idiots. oh well. we had to wait awhile for the same number bus to come back in the opposite direction, but luckily we had plenty of time to kill. we managed to convince the bus driver to let us go one stop back for free.. though we got a wierd look in the process. man did we feel dumb. we still ended up being three hours early though.
so we also became very aware that we couldnt afford dinner. here was (almost?) all of our dinner money:

remember how i said donating money to the ensemble came back to haunt us? we may not have given much, but any little bit would have helped us at this point haha.
seeing as we didn't need anymore pounds, we didn't want to get any more out of the atm.. which left us with a total of 5.83. for both of us. we ended up splitting an onion rings. fries. and eventually a glass of "lemonade" that was 1.50 that the guy let us have for 1.43. how nice. before we got to the lemonade part though, and after the onion rings, we still had 3.83 left.. so i went up and asked if we could get chips and a half since thats what we could afford. i think the guy thought i was crazy. he said yea but only charged me for one.. but i dont think we were served chips and a half anyways, so i guess it all came out even.

with all this extra time at the airport, we still ended up running for security when we realized we were cutting it close.. i swear only we could be super early and still manage to be almost late. its a skill.

some morals from scotland though:
people are super nice.
"every mess up is a lesson learned" - chloe

and we definitely deserve some ice cream before this trip is over - most keep the sackheim family tradition alive. :)