The interesting thing about Queen Street Station is that there are only seven platforms all right next to each other, and the tracks dead-end at the station. You can see them all from the entrance. This just surprised me because Glasgow is the largest city in Scotland, but I guess they run trains often enough (every 10 minutes, it seems) that they don't need more platforms.
Once everyone met up at the train station, we headed toward the subway, since the tour was a "subcrawl" based on the route of the famous pubcrawl, in which you go to a pub at every stop. Passing by the buildings, I noticed how much Glasgow reminded me of Pittsburgh, probably because both cities were important in the Industrial Revolution and so were built up at around the same time. The architecture is very late 19th century, and the old buildings are sandstone, like the ones in downtown Pittsburgh.
Guess which is Glasgow and which is Pittsburgh.
If you're from either place, that's cheating, shush.
So yeah, the second one is Glasgow. But I could totally see it fitting in at home. Anyway, the first place we stopped on the way to the subway station was the Lighthouse, which was originally the Mitchell Street Building, designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh. He was a really famous architect in the late 19th century who pioneered the modernist style and built a lot of important things in Glasgow like the Herald Building and some other stuff we visited. Our tour guide, Andy, was actually a grad student in architecture, so he knew all about the history and designs of the buildings. Also, Andy had my favorite accent ever, and he wasn't actually hard to understand, even though Glasgow accents are supposedly the most difficult.
Andy took us up the tower in the Lighthouse to see what is allegedly the best view in the city. It wasn't very high up, but it was still cool.
The Lighthouse is Scotland's national center for design and architecture, and the building is basically a museum about Glasgow's architecture. I think I'd like to go back sometime because it seems interesting.
Mackintosh knows.
We rode the subway to the Scotland Street School, which Mackintosh built in 1872. It closed in 1979 when almost all of the shipyards had been closed and there weren't enough people living in the area where all of the laborers' families used to live. The school is a really cool museum now, and Andy told us that he used to go on field trips there when he was little. They do reenactments of Victorian class sessions for the students, and sometimes they accidentally make the kids cry because the Victorian teachers were so mean.
Victorian classroom
They had various rooms set up like classrooms from different eras. It was pretty neat to learn about the history of a school since the late 1800s, as I'd never seen a museum dedicated to that before. I also thought that the way the seats were arranged in levels like bleachers was interesting.
By the by, I saw this billboard outside the school. Pretty funny representation. It's odd to me how they advertise U.S. tourism for the entire country at once. It's such a huge place with so many different things, I can't imagine summing them all up in one advertisement. You really can't see all of America in a week. Or even a month. Or even possibly ever.
But I'm not in the U.S. right now, so back to Glasgow.
We got on the subway again and rode to Govan. There was a time when Govan possibly could have usurped Glasgow instead of the other way around because it was actually bigger. Again, this reminded me of Pittsburgh because the city of Allegheny used to be huge before Pittsburgh usurped it.
The history of Govan is cool though because it used to be very industrial with a lot of shipyards, and when they couldn't compete with other nations anymore in the late 70s, they closed all of the shipyards except Fairfields. This also reminds me of Pittsburgh because there used to be a ton of steel mills until they couldn't compete anymore in the early 80s, and now there's only one steel mill left by Kennywood. In conclusion, Glasgow is Scottish Pittsburgh. Or Pittsburgh is American Glasgow.
The Glasgow Museum of Transport, where the shipyards used to be in Govan
Speaking of transport, I forgot to mention that the subway cars in Glasgow are REALLY tiny. This is because the rock underneath the city is super hard, so I guess they only carved as much as they needed to in order to make the tunnels.
Tiny subway cars! So cute. I also love that they're orange, and a lot of the stations are decorated with Very Seventies Orange Tiles.
While in Govan, we visited the Old Govan Parish Church, which is ridiculously MASSIVE and ornate. The church was built on the site of about four previous churches dating back to medieval times, I believe. The current one is only as old as 1888, and the reason it's so huge and fancy is that Govan used to be a really wealthy area. Then during the lock-in in the 70s, when people were protesting closing the shipyards, the workers would go to the Parish because there was a short path to it from Fairfields, so they didn't technically have to leave the area.
Nowadays, the church is a museum that houses a ton of really old stone carvings, mostly slabs and "hogbacks" that used to cover graves.
That hogback in the back is the oldest one they have. To me, they look like alien pods or something.
The people in the towns where the carvings came from apparently didn't find them very significant, so they used to re-carve and re-use them and do other weird things with them. One of the hogbacks has a dent in the top where someone used it to sharpen his plow, and another guy in carved his name on a slab.
After seeing the church, we stopped at a restaurant called the Ubiquitous Chip, which has some murals painted by the famous Glasgow artist Alasdair Gray. He actually did the paintings for free because the restaurant would feed him free dinners while he was working.
The last thing we saw was the Glasgow School of Art, which was also designed by Mackintosh and is commonly considered his greatest work. Andy told us that you can take some really worthwhile tours of it, so I'll have to come back for that too.
I had a very fun, tiring day in Glasgow, and it made me really want to go back and explore some more later.
Other fun things that have happened:
1. Someone told me the other day that my accent was cool, and I was surprised because I thought American accents were considered funny here. But she said mine was different and had a sort of drawl that wasn't Southern. So I guess she meant that I have a slight Pittsburgh accent, and that is apparently cool. Although I bet if she heard a serious Yinzer, she probably wouldn't have liked it as much, haha.
2. I started listening to this London oldies station online that my friend recommended, and it's really great because they play all these songs I never hear on air or don't even know. It's interesting to hear what were the big hits and artists here and other songs by artists who were only one hit wonders in the U.S. They also have a late night 60s show wherein I haven't heard of like 70% of the songs and artists, so it's awesome to be introduced to that.
3. I also got to see St. Andrews for the first time last Wednesday at our rugby game there. It was kind of an ordeal because not everyone on our team showed up, so we had to forfeit and then push back the game when some of our players were coming late and got stuck in traffic and then lost. But the St. Andrews' team was really nice and they let us borrow some players, who turned out to be really funny people and fun to play with. The game started out bad but ended up being really fun, and the weather was gorgeous. I played better than I expected to after being out of it for so long, and my muscles hurt A LOT the next few days, so I must have played hard.
I'm really glad that I'm finally getting around Scotland more, and I'm planning to go back to St. Andrews on Friday. I've also signed up for a trip to Glencoe and the Western Highlands in a couple weeks, which I'm extra excited about. Now I just have to remember to work on those darned essay outlines....
Song of the Day (because I am going places!):
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