Saturday, March 30th
Since, I had turned in a paper the day before, I spent most of Friday being lazy and waiting until Debbie arrived at around midnight. She stayed over at my flat for the night, and we got up fairly early the next morning to catch a train to Glasgow. I had only been to Glasgow once before for the subcrawl tour, so I was eager to see other parts of the city. We decided when we got there that we should hop on the double-decker tour bus so we would be able to see all the highlights in the little time we had there. We sat on the open top because it was surprisingly sunny that day, but whenever the bus moved, the wind it generated was freezing. It was still a really good tour though, and the guide told some hilarious jokes. There's so much to see in Glasgow, and I'm really excited to go back and check out all the things that they showed us. I think Glasgow might actually be my favorite city in Scotland, next to Inverness.
Here is a map of the route we were on:
We got off at the Glasgow School of Art so we could take a tour of the main building, which was designed by the famous architect Mackintosh. The tour was very unique because it focused on the artistic elements of the architecture, and I think that made it more interesting than visiting a regular museum. The cool thing about the building was that it looked fairly modern and even kind of art deco for something built in the 1890s and early 1900s.
My favorite part was the old library, which is now used to house the special collections.
Unfortunately, since everything in Scotland seems to close at 5pm, we weren't able to do much else. We decided to walk to the Glickman's Confectionary, Glasgow's oldest candy store. They had some really fantastic tablet and macaroon bars, and the nice lady there even gave us discounts.
After that, we had to catch our train to Inverness, and we arrived at about 9:30 at night. Everyone in Inverness seems to be ridiculously nice, which is one of the reasons I love it there. Some random guys asked us if we needed help when they saw us standing outside the train station with our map, and they directed us to our B&B. The guy who ran The Quaich B&B we stayed at was also extremely nice, and he stayed up late to let us in and give us our room key. He even gave us a map with restaurants that were still open for dinner. Then, when we were eating at a Chinese Buffet, a guy at the table next to us struck up a conversation, and we talked to him for a while.
But the best part of Inverness was the Hootananny pub. Every night, they have a traditional Scottish band on the bottom floor and a rock band on the top floor. The band upstairs was called the Imagineers, and they were good (the lead singer sang with a great Scottish accent), but the band downstairs, the Mad Hatters, was AMAZING. There were two fiddlers who played and switched off so effortlessly, and their songs made great dance music. I could have listened to them all night.
However, I was still really glad to come back to the B&B. Our room was super cute and cozy, and I fell asleep pretty quickly.
Sunday, March 31st
On Easter morning, we had to get up rather early for breakfast. The great variety of food was kind of like an Easter brunch, and the B&B owner and other people eating with us were fun to talk to. I love that they do their eggs sunny-side-up in the UK because restaurants in the US don't like to do that for health reasons, and it's nice to have eggs a different way than scrambled, for once.
After breakfast, we walked to Inverness city centre and got on the tour bus that would take us to Isle of Skye. It was a smaller bus than I'd anticipated, but I got used to it. It was a perfect blue sky day, so Loch Ness was especially beautiful as we passed it. We even got see Uruqhart Castle in the distance.
Omg, da monstah!
The next stop was the public restrooms, which wouldn't have been exciting if there weren't two Highland cows in the field right next to them! These were the first Highland cows I got to see up close, and the tour guide gave us food to feed them. Even though they're pretty gentle animals, the cows were difficult to pet because they kept swinging their heads around, and we had to avoid getting hit by their huge horns.
The ones we saw were black like this. The black ones are a rarer variety than the red ones because when Queen Victoria first visited Scotland and saw them, she said she liked the red ones better, so people only bred red ones until the black ones almost became extinct.
After visiting the cows, we went to Invermoriston, which had a really pretty little creek with a bridge over it. We threw sticks into the water and chased them to the other side to see who "won" the stick race.
You can rent cute little cabins here. I want one.
On our way to Skye, we drove past some beautiful mountains with a large loch in front of them. I didn't know it at the time, but I think the mountains were the Five Sisters of Kintail, which are supposedly the most beautiful mountains in all of Scotland. I agree with that claim because they were the most amazing thing I saw on the whole trip. I tried to take pictures, but they really don't compare to reality at all. They were one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen in my life, even more than Glencoe (which was another great trip I will describe in a later post).
The reflection in the water was so cool.
Next, we stopped a loch which I think was called Loch Duich. We wandered around there a bit and placed out orders for lunch at a little bar on Skye. The loch wasn't far from Eilean Donan Castle, which I was really excited about because it's one of the most famous castles in the world, and the one that I'd most wanted to see. It wasn't as isolated in person as I'd imagined it would be, mostly because of all the tourists coming in and out all the time. But it was still very scenic, and the interior was pretty cool. Apparently the castle was mostly destroyed a long time ago and remained that way until the early 1900s, when a family bought it and rebuilt most of it so they could live there in the summer. It still belongs to that family, but they let people tour it, and it was kind of interesting to see a castle that people actually live in.
You can see a bit of scaffolding on the back where they were renovating, but most of the castle was still tourable.
After Eliean Donan, we finally moved on to the Isle of Skye. I had heard the landscape was really cool, and it definitely was. There were some amazing hills, like the Red and Black Cuillins, and a little beach with a great view of Bla Bheinn off the shore.
We headed back to Inverness after that, and had time to stop for some tea and biscuits at a nice hotel. Also, in the tour bus quiz, Debbie won a Highland cow poster, which she really loved.
Once we arrived in Inverness, Debbie and I dropped our stuff off at our hostel and had dinner at an Italian restaurant. When we got back to the hostel, we found out that the people who were originally going to stay in our room had moved to another one. So we got the room all too ourselves, which was helpful because we needed to get up at 5am to catch our train.
The next morning, I had enough time to show Debbie Stirling's campus and take her to the Thistles mall before she head to leave for Edinburgh airport. In the end, we agreed it was a really perfect, problem-free vacation.
The Student Radio Association Conference
In order to keep this post from getting any more eternal, I'm just going to focus on highlights. I went to the conference in Leicester, England, with Lauren, Craig, Fanny, and Leigh, who are all full-time Stirling students on Air3 Radio, Stirling University's student station. They were all really fun people, and I'm glad that I got to know them as we traveled, hung out, and attended the conference sessions together. The conference itself had some good information, but a lot of it was pretty straightforward, as well. I did learn some things, and it was cool to hear about the ways in which UK radio is different from US radio.
There was this one guy who gave a lecture about international radio, and he totally slammed the US, so it was sort of awkward and hilarious at the same time. He clearly didn't realize there might be an American present. Craig tweeted at him about it and the guy tweeted back something like, "haha sorry, I hope she understood why I said that." I actually didn't understand his particular reasons, although I do think American radio has its problems, just not anything he identified. But it was still a pretty funny situation overall, even though he pretty much degraded my entire job market. I guess I just have to make some awesome American radio to prove him wrong.
It was really cool to be part of a student radio station at a conference, since WDUB doesn't do anything like that, and I'm glad that I went and had the experience.
However, the part of the trip that I found the most fun was just hanging out after the conference was over. Our train bookings got messed up and were really late at night, so we ended up going to dinner at Wagamama and seeing a movie, Jack the Giant Slayer, together. Afterward, we hung out at a pub and then got on the train at midnight. We had a crazy 3 hour layover in Sheffield, so we hung out a McDonald's full of drunk people. Even though we were all dead tired, I think we still had a lot of fun, as we played some games to pass the time, like the one where you stick a paper with a name to your forehead and have to guess who you are. I don't remember much after Sheffield though because I was either asleep or basically sleepwalking, and I'm pretty sure we all went straight to bed when we got back to Stirling.
So that's most of my spring break. I also went on a day trip to Glencoe at the very end, but I'll save that for my next post. I promise it will come much sooner than this one did!
Song of the Post (because I have been a long time gone, sorry):
I'm famous now because I'm mentioned in your blog. Haha :) Thanks! That trip was a lot of fun. It was great to see Scotland.
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