Ashton Lane

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When they say the party at Glasgow never stops, they really mean it. Most of the places I've seen close at 3 am every night but Sunday, and cars and taxis are busy all night. An excellent center to have a great time any night is Ashton Lane. A small cobbled walkthrough, Ashton has restaurants, pubs, clubs, and theaters from head to toe.

So far I've tried lunch at Mimmo's, an Italian style bistro, and Jinty McGuinty's. Mimmo's food was excellent, the prawn salad was creamy but tasty, and the pork sausages, as the waiter's request, were full of flavor and truly delicious. The waiter may have been a tad sluggish and...thirsty, but he was kind enough to invite us to his "party for charity" he was throwing later that night. I'll leave that story for another entry however. McGuinty's is a Irish pub, and during the first day of Student Orientation I went there with a group of fellow Internationals to get to know each other. We all enjoyed ourselves, and there were mates there from Alabama, Quebec, Australia, Singapore, and Hong Kong.

The afternoon is a nice to see Ashton for sure, but if you want to see what it's all about, you have to go at night. Once the sun goes down, the decorative lights go up and the regulars all arrive, some dressed to kill and others...well let's just say they're only looking for a pint. A fun pub to sit at on a student budget is Vodka Wodka, where they believe "There are no ugly people, only too little vodka". The bartenders are all younger mates, and the crowd is very fun.

My personal favorite place on Ashton is the Grosvenor Theater. The snacks are relatively cheap (especially compared to U.S. cinemas!) and the student discount makes seeing movies regularly very affordable. The theaters themselves are not like American ones, you pick where you sit when you buy your ticket, and in the back row are couches and pillows. I've seen two films there so far, Akira, an old cult Anime film that they've been playing every weekend at 11pm for years, and The In-Betweeners, a spring break coming of age story along the lines of Superbad, but much more British.

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