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Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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Wednesday, August 1 2007

setting: somewhere over the North Atlantic Ocean

At around noon British Summer Time, we landed at Glasgow's International Airport, site of a bizarre flaming-vehicle terrorist attack back in June. The first indication that this was an entirely different sort of place was the temperature of the air leaking into the boarding ramp. Though it was August in the Northen Hemisphere, it was in the 60s. The far bigger shock came after a cash machine rejected our debit card and we had to turn cash into British Pounds Sterling. $50 yielded only about £22, though I'm sure the exchange rate in the airport wasn't the best available. We knew the exchange rate was going to be terrible, but we'd been thinking the pound was worth about $2. (Gretchen had planned this trip several months ago when the American dollar was stronger against the pound.)
Dispirited by the exchange rate, we wandered out into the daylight in front of the airport looking for a bus into the city centre. We didn't know it at the time, but we should have considered ourselves lucky that overhead there were swaths of blue sky and a bright sun.
From the central Glasgow bus terminal, we walked west on Renfrew to the place we'd be staying for the next two nights, Mclays Guest House in the Garnet Hill neighborhood. The neighborhood is defined by a narrow steep-sloped ridge running down its axis parallel to Renfrew Street.
After taking an unexpected nap, Gretchen provided the motivation for us to do something other than lie around the hotel room all day. I fired up my camera (a three and a half year old Canon PowerShot S400) but found an old problem was rearing its ugly visage: I was getting memory card errors. In the past I've been able to fix the problem by cleaning the CF card contacts, but I was having no luck. I even fashioned a little hose out of an empty ballpoint pen tube to allow me to vacuum inside the CF card slot, but none of this did any good. So when we wandered down to the Glasgow Cathedral (still blackened from the Industrial Age), I was unable to snap any photos. It was closed and we couldn't get inside, but it would have been nice to attempt to document the grim beauty of its outside (as well as the many crumbling memorials to long-forgotten Glaswegians in the surrounding churchyard).
Our next goal was a place to sit down and enjoy a pint. We went to Blackfriars, a place recommended by the guidebook but Gretchen didn't like the vibe of the place, so we ended up at the 13th Note, a vegetarian café/bar/music venue. It's hip in a Williamsburg-Silverlake sort of way. The waitresses are cute in a late-20s kind of way, but they all have big pot bellies and either tattoos or edgy facial piercings. After we'd settled down and ordered our pints and food, I pulled out my camera and found it was working! (For the rest of the trip, the behavior of my camera would serve as something of an omen.)
The pint I drank was Tennents Lager, the cheap native Glasgow brew. It's nothing special, but I was going for an authentic Glasgow experience. Meanwhile Gretchen was enjoying a mildly-sweet bottle of hard cider. Craft-brewed alcoholic cider seemed to be popular at the 13th Note (and Scotland generally).
One of the things one forgets about UK cuisine is the quality of their chips, which they've been perfecting for generations. They differ from American french fries in the creaminess of their insides.


Someone enjoying a bottle of hard cider at the 13th Note in Glasgow.

See more photographs from the Scotland trip.


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http://asecular.com/blog.php?070801

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