22 Jul 2012: Feeling like Joe Biden

22 Jul 2012:

Feeling like Joe Biden

Glasgow, Scotland, UK/Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
H: 18/21 L: 13/13 Weather: Mostly Cloudy/Mostly Cloudy

On the morning of July 22nd, I slept in a whole hour.  This was apparently significant enough that I added it as a separate bullet point on my notes of the day.  Okay then.

Next, it was off to the Kelvingrove Museum, the most highly recommended attraction in Glasgow that I cared about on Tripadvisor.  It's a bit of an everything museum: art, science, history, etc.  And it was a nice place.  Unfortunately, though, at the time I got to it, I was an hour early for it to open.  Instead, I wander over to a food stand, where I request a donut.  "We're out of donuts," says the vendor, "but we do have candy."

Okay, could someone clarify this for me?  In the US, his response was definitely very odd, particularly as right next to the candy were muffins.  In fact, something along the lines of "sorry, we're out of donuts, but we do have muffins" is pretty much the only valid answer here if he was seeking to provide an alternative.  Candy is not a viable alternative to a donut.  However, I feel like I read once that doughnuts are not considered a breakfast food in the UK; they're more like a snack.  If so, his response could be considered an entertaining portrayal of trans-Atlantic differences in cuisine.  If not, wtf?  Candy is not for breakfast.  I get a cherry muffin and eat it while wandering around.

Finally, at 11, I meet up with my friend Andrew and head inside.  We wander around aimlessly inside, mostly because we're mostly interested in talking to each other.  Public service announcement: the tartan only dates to about 1600.  They're quite new, really.  After heading out of the museum, I had some salmon pizza (!) at the restaurant across the street, which was delicious.  Andrew was a lot of fun to hang out with!  He and his partner are getting engaged, and I happened to get the scoop a bit earlier than our compatriots on the political forum we met at.  Hopefully DOMA will be repealed in time for he and his partner (a Pittsburgher) to marry and get some legal recognition by the federal government over here.  We headed out to the train station, taking half of the underground transit system of Glasgow to get there.  (Almost literally.  It is a circle.  Literally.  And we did almost a semicircular track around it.  So, yeah.)  The Glasgow Central train station is beautiful; pretty much exactly the representation of train stations that one is trained to expect from the US.  Before I knew it, it was time to be off to Edinburgh!

For more about what the trip was like, see this post, generally the stuff in allcaps.  I truly felt like I understood Joe Biden more when on the train.

Edinburgh is a very pretty city.  It's old, a lot older than Glasgow, and it shows.  At the very least, it shows in that the streets can be very, very steep, as I learned.  As I made my way precariously up the practically 45-degree slope, I finally made it to my hostel (the Castle Rock Hostel, pretty much right across the street from the castle), where it took about 20 minutes to check in.  Why?  Well, they were being super nice, and rejiggering my reservation (which I had made on two separate occasions for each night) to make sure I didn't have to move around.  I was relieved to hear it!  At Castle Rock, rooms are named—I, naturally, got the "Scottish Slang" room, specifically the "Nae Bother" bed.

I dump off my stuff and run off to the Starbucks, where I'm late to meet with Vasco, who I also know from the same political forum I know Andrew from.  (This will be a recurring theme.)  I manage to pass by it (also a recurring theme) before I double back and see it again and finally find him.  It's time for us to be off to his church for the 5:30 service.  He goes to a Free Church of Scotland service.  For some context, you should probably see this header on the church's Wiki article.  In any case, all the Psalms we sang were a capella, which was interesting; as I've learned, so much of church to me is the organ and its magical sounds, so having no instrumental accompaniment was strange.  There were also super long readings: about two and a half chapters long, total, from Acts.

I did generally enjoy the service.  At the very least, it was nice to get some Jesus during this trip.  But a couple things stuck out.  First, there was a big difference between the comments of the officials in this church—the Scottish Government just mooted a proposal to allow gay marriage in Scotland—and the comments of officials in my current church in East Lansing, where there was recently a sermon on Bible verses that included 2 Samuel 1:26:

I grieve for you, Jonathan my brother, you were very dear to me; Your love for me was wonderful, more wonderful than that of women.

I was much more on the side of my church!  (Don't worry, this passage is wonderfully complicated, just like every other, and the interpretation of it can be debated forever, so whatever you think about it you're probably right somehow.)

Secondly, during the service, I seemed to develop an allergy to a capella music.  Or maybe there were hordes of cats rampaging around.  I don't really know.  But my nose ran a lot, and it was frustrating!

Vasco and his girlfriend, who I met later that night, were really quite wonderful to hang out with.  We ended up going back to their apartment and watching the movie Howard the Duck, which was... special.  And not quite what I was expecting.  Somehow, I was under the impression it was a movie about a duck who travels into our universe and becomes a disco phenom, rising to prominence in the field.  It's actually a movie about a duck who comes to Earth, seduces a random disco singer, and then somehow saves the world from a very ill-defined invasion.  Er, yeah.

Other stuff happened.

Then I got to bed way too late!