Glasgow

Alexander, Molly, Ted, and I decided to go to Glasgow for a day trip on Sunday. The trip was primarily motivated by the 7 quid round trip megabus tickets. The bus left at 8:30am so we left David Horn around 7:45am. The megabus tickets said "St. Andrew's Squre Bus Station." I looked up how to get to St. Andrew's Square and we got there successfully, but that's when we ran into a bit of trouble. We weren't exactly sure where the bus station was. Alexander asked one of the people cleaning the park (at 8am on a Sunday morning) and it turned out we were standing next to a very large building that said bus station.


In the UK, megabus is owned by citylink and is just discounted tickets to citylink buses. The bus was actually pretty nice, except that I could not figure out how to turn off the AC. It was pretty cold, since the weather outside was so dreary.


Once we got to Glasgow, we tried to find the visitor's center, but, alas, it was closed on Sundays. We tried to find a place to get a full Scottish breakast. Everywhere seemed to be closed until noon. We finally stopped at a chain coffee shop. At 11am, we went to the Glasgow Modern Art Museum--the only tourist spot we had found thus far. We were not huge fans of the Museum, it was small and some pretty absurd modern art. They didn't have descriptions of the art near the pieces, so I wasn't really sure what was going on at all. Sometimes, it was hard to figure out if something was a piece of art or trash since there was no label.


The museum guard gave us a city map and directions to the cathedral, which was the highlight of the day. Once we got to the cathedral, we found out we could go inside for free at 1pm. 


This is a picture of the cathedral that Molly took:

We went to get lunch until the cathedral opened. The best-priced pub we found was actually Irish, O'Neill's. We all got full breakfasts with Guinesses. I opted for the vegetarian breakfast, which included toast, beans, tomatoes, mushrooms, fried eggs, and Quorn sausages. The regular Irish breakfast also had sausage, white pudding, and bacon. We happened to be there during a Hearts-Celtics game. The Celtics and the Rangers are the big football teams in Glasgow (the best part of Glasgow is definitely football). There is a lot of conflict between Celtics and Rangers fans because the Celtics fans are Catholic and the Rangers fans are Protestant, so matches bring up a lot of underlying tensions. The game was at the Hearts stadium in Edinburgh and the Hearts ended up winning (we left the bar before any goals were scored, though). 


After lunch, we went back to the cathedral and headed inside. It's the only cathedral in Scotland that survived the Reformation untouched and you can tell as soon as you walk inside. It's gorgeous! It's also huge because it had so many different uses. 


St. Mungo's tomb is in the lower part of the church. It's not labeled at all so I didn't realize I had seen it at first. It's covered with cloth and used as an altar. St. Mungo is the patron saint of Scotland, salmon, those accused of infidelity (interestingly, it does not say those wrongfully accused), and against bullies. We're still trying to figure out how this connects to the magical hospital in the Harry Potter books.


The cathedral was the highlight of the trips, but the winter gardens were also beautiful. We saw the world's largest terracotta fountain. It was pretty interesting because each side of the fountain pictures people from a commonwealth (India, Australia, etc.).


Molly's photo:

We tried to walk to Hampden stadium, but it was too far. Instead, Alexander and Ted decided to visit the Glasgow necropolis while Molly and I grabbed coffee. After that, we were out of things to do and headed back to the bus station.


Overall, Glasgow is not somewhere I plan to return to. I know that we did not see all the best parts, but there were not many places to see.