We’re here! Pictures are coming shortly, once I figure out why my new camera won’t upload properly. We don’t have Internet at home yet, so if my responses are delayed, please forgive me. In the meantime, you’ll have to use your imagination…
Welcome to Glasgow!
Some places take a while to warm up to. While Chicago turned out to be an amazing living experiment, thriving with rich, cultural happenings and warm-hearted characters, the first time Shaun and I visited Chicago together, we thought the city was pretty icy. And this was in August.
Imagine us then: two road-tripping suburban-bred Michigan teenagers trying to figure out public transit for the first time in our lives. Desperate to purchase a subway ticket, the machine wouldn’t take our bills. In retrospect, that’s the only trouble we were having: crumpled money. But in the dark, bustle of the train station, with a gaggle of exasperated working stiffs in line behind us, all sighing and rolling their eyes instead of moving things along by helping us, we blushed and grew clumsy. Were we too dumb for Chicago? Finally, a piss-soaked homeless man wearing mottled pigeon feathers sticking up from his matted Afro, shuffled over to us. He took our dollar with dusty, gnarl-knuckled hands. He smoothed it and fed it to the machine expertly, retrieving our fare ticket for us. When asked, we placed a tip in the homeless man’s dusty, tender palm, causing the immaculate suits behind us to shift awkwardly; the air was charged with the distrust that inequitable capitalism breeds, plus an added undercurrent of guilt and accompanying resentment. As first impressions go, this was not a good one.
This moment does not exclusively define Chicago; in a fair world, no person, no place deserves to be defined by first impressions. It was only by chance, a tiny misfortune that we met Chicago on a day that it woke on the wrong side of the bed. For after pushing forward, our curiosity alive and buzzing, we discovered so much good in Chicago’s mammoth city blocks, its monolithic museums, in that long, languid stretch of shore. My friends are in Chicago. My cat is in Chicago! I discovered myself there. I had a place in its world. In these ways, I will always have a home in the Windy City.
My first impressions of Glasgow, on the other hand, are that this place is unabashedly, undeniably awesome. Glasgow is like the kid in school who was cool without trying, who could care less if he was popular or not, who quietly slipped away from categorization: full of sweet surprises. If our newfound home were personified and cast in a movie, Johnny Depp or Juliet Louis would play Glasgow; this city is quirky in the most revealing, sexy ways.
After a very long and very delayed series of flights that began the morning of Thursday, September 14, we arrived in our new home base around 11 pm Friday night. The flight was fine and the delays only inspired the usual banal traumas: restlessness, chapped lips, fast food overload–the ill affects of which culminated into a single, red, pulsating pimple. We learned, quite by accident, that if you check the boxes “kosher” or “vegetarian” while booking your flight online with Aer Lingus, you will be served first.
Some good did come of the delays when the one-hour flight from Dublin to Glasgow was rescheduled for ten hours later due to our previous late departure. With ten hours on our hands, we decided to explore Dublin. I never knew a city to be so well behaved! Aside from our super talkative, sweet, yet mildly misogynistic airport cab driver (criticism of female drivers seems to be amplified in the UK), daytime Dublin was amazingly quiet.
Daytime in downtown Chicago is crashing with noise. The El. The traffic. The pleading homeless. The charity solicitors. The bucket-drumming boys. The zealot preacher-man camped out by Old Navy who uses a microphone to badger all who pass: “repent, you evil sinners! The end is coming!” The bubbly cell phone conversations. The sirens. Did I mention the El?
There was no honking in Dublin. No sirens. No rumbling, screeching El. Only bundles of Catholic-school uniformed children who joshed and chided each other in their cheery sing song way. There were cardigan-ed Grandmas and Grandpas who moved slowly through the streets, nodding their hellos. Shoppers shopped. The streets were busy, but somehow mild, unrushed. The weather was gorgeous: The breeze sliced right through the heat of the surprisingly scalding sun. We ate at a pub and learned that sausages in the Ireland are not the crispy on the outside, firm on the inside, semi-spicy meat logs that they are in the U.S. Rather, Irish sausages are more akin to bland, boiled, oversized hot dogs. We stumbled upon a military band playing at a monument dedicated to Irish independence. We wondered the bank of the Liffey and drank a super-sweet orange soda drink called Club Orange. On the bus ride back to the airport we slept heavily, mouths agape, necks lolling.
Aside from a friendly chat with an older English gentleman at the airport, our short flight to Glasgow was pretty uneventful. The cab ride to our new apartment was fun. The expressway directly out of the airport could have been anywhere: my breath was baited as I waited for the city to unfold. And suddenly, it did.
Glowing nightclubs beckoned, laughing groups of people paraded along the sidewalks. Shaun’s school, The University of Glasgow, stood immense, grandiose, a gothic, beautiful masterpiece. And the hills! I didn’t expect there to be such hills! Huge hills! Like San Francisco. Driving up the hill to our apartment, I thought, “I will have such a nice ass after living here from hiking up and down hills all the live long day!” I was suddenly talkative, awake.
“What is your favorite thing to do here?” I asked the cabbie.
“Me likes to get drrruunk.”
Wow! A living, breathing stereotype! “Where at?”
Cheerfully, the cabbie gave us a list of places, and assured us that we were in a great city for “shopping, drinking, and the like.”
Even though I hadn’t changed my contacts or underwear for two days at this point, even though I was jet lagged and starving, opening the door to our new apartment made me as giddy as a fifth-grader at a slumber party.
Our apartment is the shit. We have a fireplace! And pots and pans and plates and a cute little table by the window and a warm shower and a tiny little fridge. The electric plugs make it possible to conserve energy because they have a switch to turn them on and off. This way our appliances won’t use “phantom power” when they are off. Even the stove and the oven have this! Why doesn’t everyone do that? Such a good idea.
Snuggling into bed that night, I was a sugar-pumped kid again, trying to do a Scottish accent (“me likes to get druuuunk!”), burrowing into Shaun’s armpit, snorting with laughter. I don’t remember when or how sleep came. Perhaps Shaun knocked me out to get me quiet.
Waking on Saturday, we unpacked our few things (clothes and toiletries) before going out to explore.
It’s chilly here. Late October in the Midwest chilly. And gray. And misty. It always looks like it is going to rain, but so far it has not. My hair is not very cooperative here. In sweaters and jean jackets, with an umbrella crammed in the backpack, we quickly found a bakery and I devoured a Chelsea Roll, which is like a cinnamon bun with raisins and soft, pink icing. We met a mom and her elementary-aged son walking their two cute black dogs. “The black one can be a real nightmare sometimes,” the boy told us as we pet the dogs. Wandering through the neighborhood, sweet cottage-type homes with thriving gardens lined the hilly streets. After a time, a miniscule Grandma inquired whether we were lost.
“Sort of. We just moved here last night; we’re just exploring.”
“Oh!” Her papery face lit up, blue eyes flashing, “hop on the #44 bus across the way. It will take you into town.”
The people here are nice. And not in that double-edged Southern-hospitality type way. They are just simply kind: no hidden agenda, no nosiness, no rush, no rudeness, and no sense of imposition. If they are the first to make conversation with you, they will talk super fast and you have to be careful to listen really hard and have your wits about you to try to latch on to what they are saying. Once you grab a thread and respond to it, and they hear that you are American, they slow down, without making a show of it, and suddenly, you are communicating. Some people are easier to understand than others. Drunk dudes hanging about pubs are the hardest to understand, but that is pretty universal.
The city center was amazing. Simply amazing. It is still so recent and my reactions to it are so fresh and still coursing through me, so my writing about it is probably going to be littered with piss poor descriptions that rely on adjectives more than details. But for you, kind reader, I’m going to do my best to slow it down.
The architecture is a mix of old and new. Gothic structures with ornate sculptures mix with newer, stylized buildings effortlessly. Louder than Dublin, but in a much more pleasant way than Chicago, Glasgow sings with sound: street musicians are everywhere, jolly pub revelers clamor near every corner, clumps of giggling teenage shoppers litter the streets. The people watching is first class: punks with mile-high blue Mohawks, cosmopolitan fashionistas, old people, young people, white people, Asian people, Indian people. Weirdly enough, we even saw a group of Native American street musicians hamming it up for a massive crowd. It’s a sad state of affairs when an American has make a cross-Atlantic trip to encounter the culture of a native of their own country. But it was beautiful to see.
Every place we went, the people were astoundingly warm. Philosophy for shop clerks in the states seems to be more like “service with a grudge” than “service with a smile.” Here, not only do shop clerks smile, but they might tell a joke, or ask a question about your travels. I feel good about my friend-making prospects here.
We bought cell phones, towels, groceries, electronic plug adapters, a wallet for Shaun that was wide enough for pounds, cereal bowls, public transport passes, city maps, and books about our new fair city, including one of short stories that emerged from Shaun’s soon-to-be graduate program. We visited Central Station and loaded up on subway and bus route info, Scots Rail info, and a million-and-one travel brochures to see castles and other fun, tourist things. The best part of the day was discovering the Centre for Contemporary Arts.
We moved to Chicago two months before our country went to war with Iraq. I felt so alone. My friends were far from me, my family was in the process of re-inventing itself, and my country was doing something so unlawful, so unjust, so outrageous that I couldn’t watch the news without flying into a fit of rage. It wasn’t until we saw a war themed show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago that I truly felt that there was another voice of dissent besides my husband and myself. I felt nurtured, safe, connected. It inspired me to go back time and time again. It inspired me to work in the marketing department there upon graduation from college.
The Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow gave me that same feeling of connectedness. The display of fresh ideas, the discourse, the downright homey-ness of the CCA is unmatched by any other arts center I’ve ever been to. It feels so welcoming, it smells like delicious, healthy food, the colors and textures of the walls are varied: brick work, warm pallets of hunter greens and purples. Two exhibitions graced the intimate space: Marcell Dzama: The Root of a Tree and Erica Eyres: I Love You, But I Hate You.
I first fell in love with Dzama during our spring trip to NYC this year. His chummy, yet cryptic work displayed at MOMA reminded me of a children’s book gone wrong, an Edward Gory type of playful horror. Dzama’s work at the CCA in Glasgow had this same thread, with the added bonus of huge, furry sculptural pieces of monster costumes. Right up my alley!
I’d never encountered Erica Eyres’ work before, but it was amazing. She’s an American artist who resides in Glasgow and seems to be in her late twenties or so and I hope to run into her sometime because I think we’d make really good friends. She is a portraiture artist and one work in her show was a funny, fictitious video-piece about a beauty queen who had her face surgically removed. Eyres plays the role of all the characters in the films, all of which are being “interviewed” about the beauty queen’s “brave decision.” The characters are nuanced and hysterical and with so many perfectly human layers. The scripting is divine. I loved this piece! I want to go back to see it again today, which I might, since the center is free and has the most mouthwateringly good healthy food in the city.
Aside from devouring the two exhibitions at the CCA, we also devoured an astonishgly good lunch there. I had cauliflower/butternut soup and a salad and Shaun had a cappuccino, soup, and what I’m told was a spectacular chicken sandwich. The CCA also has a bar upstairs where live music, readings, and fun bouts of drunkenness happen until 1 am. This Friday or Saturday, we are planning to head up to that bar to check out their DJ series. The CCA also has a theater, which is currently running a fall film series. We are going Wednesday night to see the Short Film Night. October 17 is also blocked off on my calendar to see works from their Transgendered Film Season. Very soon I will be seeking employment there, I can tell.
Today we are scheduled to explore the University of Glasgow. We will also be needing more groceries, preferably at a more conveniently located grocer than the one we purchased at yesterday. The sun was blushing orange on the horizon at about 8 am today, but it’s been eclipsed by the foggy gray again. As dreary as the weather seems, it really suits this place. The gardens, the thick carpets of grass, and the ornate architecture liven things up more than you’d expect. Plus, the people aren’t depressed grouches.
Anyhow, cheers to more adventures today!
::Fun With Scottish Words::
Oosey: fluffy, with bits of fluff coming off.
“Ma’s new sweater’s gone all oosey!”
Plooky: covered in pimples
“Plooky or no, ah’m gonna snog him.”
Nippie sweetie: a sharp-tongued person
Y’er a pure nippie sweetie.
::Scottish Venacular Trivia of the Day::
Guess what this phrase means: “”ah’ll bide in ma scratcher till lunchtime.”
