Day 7- Glasgow!!

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It’s Glasgow day!! Our first proper travel trip out of the city. We had brekkie at home but stopped on the way to the station for some coffee, and met Uncle Robbie at Waverley at 10am. It took about an hour to get to Glasgow, and once we stepped out into the sunshine (or lack thereof, really), the excitement really started to hit because you could tell we were definitely not in Edinburgh anymore. For one, the air smells like marijuana-…not that I know what marijuana smells like…- and the accent is definitely a lot stronger. Our first step was to get coffee somewhere, and Robbie, our fantastic tour guide, found a nice specialty coffee shop for us. And specialty it was. It was the first cafe we’ve found in Scotland that has Bonsoy (the only good soy milk- Bec has been praying to find it somewhere) and the first place to have coffee that tastes like Australia- i.e., good coffee. I’m sorry United Kingdom, your coffee just isn’t the same as home.

Anyway, after coffee we wandered over to the Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art, which has a big statue of a man on a horse out the front. We were laughing about the fact that someone had placed a traffic cone on top of the horse’s head, and Robbie explained to us that it’s actually a thing. Apparently it’s the symbol of Glasgow, and what started out as a prank is now a tradition. Someone will put a traffic cone on top of the statue (although I’m not quite sure how- it’s pretty big), and every time the council takes it down it’s not long until there’s another one up there. We went inside the gallery and spent a few hours wandering around- I could have stayed in there all day. Lots of Warhol which I haven’t seen in such a long time!

After the modern art gallery we were very ready for lunch, and Robbie told us that curries are an absolute staple of Glasgow. We walked for about 30 minutes to a place that turned out to be not quite what we thought it would be, so Robbie took us somewhere else to one of his favourite places. We had a range of curries for lunch (Bec and I also ordered some apple ciders that ended up being bigger than our heads), and then stepped back out into the crisp Glasgow air. Across the road was the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, so we decided to head there for the afternoon.

We could have spent all day in here as well! So many beautiful and interesting paintings, sculptures, antiques, and also this very interesting display of floating heads with some disturbing facial expressions. After being there for about an hour and a half and only seeing a very small portion of the displays, we were told the gallery was closing and it was time to leave. It was a long walk back to the station, and we didn’t want to be getting back to Edinburgh too late, so we decided towhead back. Once we got to the station we saw that a train to Edinburgh was leaving in 3 minutes, so we grabbed our return tickets from our pockets, sprinted towards the gate, arrived panting and slapping our tickets on the machine only to have security approach us and declare that we had bought off-peak tickets, and it was currently still peak time. It was 5:30pm, and we just had to wait until 6:30 before we could get into the station, so the most obvious option was to head to a pub. How unfortunate.

We had some gin and tonics at a nearby bar which was kind of fancy- “not exactly the epitome of a Glasgow pub, but it’ll do”- and before long it was time to head back to the station. We hopped on the train at 6:45, and were back home in our warm pjs by 8pm. The last little tid-bit of excitement for today is that for a late dinner we finally tried the McPlant- yes, McDonalds has a vegan burger here! And it is amazing- I don’t think I can ever go back to regular McDonalds.

But anyway, that’s it for today’s Glasgow blog! We were hoping to do a bit more travelling outside of Edinburgh while we’re here, but there’s still so much for us to do while we’re here that we might not get the chance! So I hope you enjoyed venturing out of Edinburgh with us. Ciao!

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