Glasgow and the Cone on its Head

I secured a Couchsurfing host in Glasgow well before leaving the States. Pélagie is a French student living in Glasgow (but moving imminently to Edinburgh). She shaves her dark hair at the temples in a way that gives her bangs a little punk edge. On her Couchsurfing profile she describes herself as a counterculture enthusiast, and she’s really into specific threads of American ’60s and ’70s culture, like Californian psychedelic rock and Jack Nicholson movies. I caught her at a good time – her classes were finished for the summer, but she wasn’t yet swamped with the burden of swapping cities. She lives with Xavier (not pronounced the way Professor X pronounces it), who’s into metal and post-rock and recently left his job. They volunteered to pick me up at the airport. I wasn’t running on much sleep, but getting to watch the first half of this little movie called Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens on the airplane rejuvenated me more than any amount of sleep ever has, and when I emerged from the airport, the Glasgow sun was warmer than I’d felt since, well, before Iceland. Iceland was wonderful, and I’ll miss it, but the transition felt great.

Edinburgh draws more tourists with its antique charm, but Glasgow reminds me in some ways of Pittsburgh – a small, accessible, working-class city whose energy comes from vibrant universities and a proud, good-humored, hard-drinking populace. After a power nap, my hosts took me out to see the city. Cool young people like the west end, where from its hilltop the beautiful University of Glasgow Main Building looms over a long main street of shops and restaurants, laced with side streets and little alleys hiding cool diversions. Péla and Xavier live just south of the River Clyde, which bisects the city, essentially separating the cool downtown stuff on its north side from the more utilitarian residential areas. I precariously perched on the back of Péla’s bike as we passed the huge BBC Scotland building, crossed a bridge over the river, traversed a big tunnel bridge over a highway, and emerged close to the university. There, Kelvingrove Park, a sloping, grassy green lined with old fences and winding paths, sprawls out before the school. The supposedly rare sunny day had brought forth enough students and families to cover the landscape (never saw a cloudy day in Glasgow). Children laughed in Scottish accents and dogs splashed through fountains as we walked bikes through the park and up to the free museum to peruse it briefly before closing time.

We meandered to our eventual destination, a cool pub with a ping-pong table, and sat out in the sun with some drinks and talked. Péla’s been in Glasgow for almost a year, Xavier a little less, partly because she wanted to be a student there (university is free for residents of most EU countries), and partly because they’re both a little bit embarrassed to be French – these two progressive, globally-minded young Frenchpeople will be the first to admit that the French can have a bad attitude about the rest of the world, and they don’t want to live into that stereotype.

Of course, with all the talk of national identity, the inevitable question was even more inevitable than usual: “So… what do you think about Donald Trump?” I started with my usual apology of “I’m so sorry you even have to be aware of this horrible train wreck,” and shared my understanding of why he’s come as far as he has, and apologized some more. I wish they hadn’t continued by asking if I thought he actually had a chance to win, because I hated to disappoint them. I’ve enjoyed watching the State Department and FBI investigations of Hillary Clinton unfold against her favor inasmuch as it’s the only way Bernie Sanders could get the nomination, but if that doesn’t happen, it’s just making a President Trump look more and more likely, so I couldn’t give them the answer they were hoping for. I’d love to say that’s enough politics on a travel blog for now, but the reality is that Europe is watching all this just as closely as we are, and it’s no joke to them either. This is real life, and they’re scared for us.

The next day, we drove up to Loch Lomond (after a quick pit stop at a place called Devil’s Pulpit), which is about as beautifully Scottish as you can imagine. After eating lunch on a sandy beach, where I discovered the most fascinating bacon-maple-syrup flavored chips (crisps), we approached our chosen trail, an ascent of about 2,500 feet to the top of Beinn Dubh, one of the tallest of the area’s rolling hills and ridges. We found our way up the slope on a barely-there trail, stopping only a few times for breath, watching sheep pastures give way to purple and yellow coated fields of wildflowers. By the time we were even a quarter of the way up, we could see far across the lake behind us, dappled with green, wooded islands, verdant slopes and peaks engulfing the horizon. I was pretty pooped early on; I couldn’t remember the last time I’d walked up for so long. Every ridge looked like it would be the last, but very few actually were. As wildflowers turned into scruffy mountain grass, I thought of the part of Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums, which I read last April, where as Kerouac’s protagonist hikes up Matterhorn in California, on the tail of his friend and mentor Japhy, he feels his youthful, spiritual optimism dissolve in his exhaustion, and he trudges on with a terrible attitude until he nears the top and wholly forgets himself. I felt spent when we finally reached the top, but it no longer mattered. I’d done it, and it was beautiful.

We hiked along the  grassy ridge for an easy hour, eventually taking a break alongside a cairn, where I basked in the sun and half-napped with my head on a rock, as Snoopy’s brother Spike might. On the way down I jogged ahead, galloping through the little step-like divots that comprised the trail now, feeling rejuvenated as if by photosynthesis, having climbed that little bit closer to the sun. “Ah Japhy you taught me the final lesson of them all, you can’t fall off a mountain,” Kerouac wrote as his character discovered the joy of fearlessly bounding down from a summit.

Staying with these French people in Scotland was nice, but I was ready to make a local friend, and because I’m an innovative little app whiz, I’d made plans to meet a very Glaswegian girl named Jane the next way. So after taking the subway (Glasgow’s system is just one big loop) towards the west end and finding a library from which to finally start typing about my Iceland week, I headed to the west end’s main street and busked until she came up to meet me in the early evening.

The first thing you’ll notice about Jane is her audacious, Nickelodeon-orange hair. You’ll see quickly that it suits her. She’s a negligible wee little bit older than me, but with one of those faces that will always make her look 10 years younger, and the biggest blue eyes you’ve ever seen. The first thing we talked about, walking to a bar where I would drink something local, was something I’d been dying address: all the cool Glasgow bands. Belle and Sebastian, Frightened Rabbit, Camera Obscura, Mogwai, Orange Juice, Teenage Fanclub, Chvrches, Simple Minds – it’s been a productive little city.  Jane is proud of the scene – we’ve been sending each other links to good songs, and she seems to have an inexhaustible supply of good local music to share. I’ve found the best way to know a city is to befriend someone who’s proud of it; Jane grew up in Glasgow, and she elucidated everything Glaswegian around us, good and bad, from the little quirks in the dialect to their sense of superiority to Edinburgh to the complexities of the recent vote on whether to stay in the UK, which stressed relationships in all of Scotland to the breaking point. Jane’s parting gift to me that night was an insistence that I try Tunnock’s Teacakes, a profoundly delicious, indulgent little desert that I cannot thank her enough for sharing with me.

The next day would be my last full day in Glasgow before heading up to St. Andrews, so I figured it was finally time to finally see the city center. I’d heard it was good for busking, and it was, only not for my kind of busking, as I discovered. The wide, pedestrian-only main street is loaded with foot traffic at all times – a much more touristy, shopping-oriented crowd than you’ll see on the west end – which is ideal for street performance. I set up in a few different places and tried my luck, but other than meeting a girl from Connecticut who plays clawhammer banjo and happily recognized my Joe Pug cover, I found little success. The scene was dominated by loud acts, like the accordion player who seems to be busking in every European city, or emotive singer/guitarists blaring their music through amps, forcing you to pack up and move when they invade your sonic territory. By the end of the day I was busking at the west end again, to relative success.

Jane wasn’t tired of me yet, thankfully. We’d decided our conversations the night before were worth continuing, and she invited me to her work thing. Despite her vitality and youthful good looks, Jane is a successful grown-up, in charge of internet stuff for an outdoorsy company, and as a result, she had just spent the whole day attending the TEDx Glasgow event. Now she was at an afterparty, rubbing shoulders with coworkers and other interesting people, and she figured she could sneak me in there without any tragic consequences. It was as easy as her meeting me at the door of the trendy hotel and walking me right in, banjo case and everything.

The bar was very much open, and the people were a lot of fun. There was Trevor, a major goof whose brand of enthusiastic awkwardness felt like something out of a Tim & Eric sketch, and Josh, a charming little English lad who pointed us to the lobby, where a man was apparently claiming to be a member of Sugarhill Gang. One of Jane’s coworkers was so proud to have us try on his little VR headset and look around a sharp little virtual house of Iceland-inspired conceptual architecture. Technology! It should tell you something about the tone of the party that a guy in street clothes could hop right in there, or how often we heard the crash of a glass breaking, or that everyone wound up covered in extra TEDx Glasgow stickers. Jane said it was pretty much business-world as usual in Glasgow.

Glasgow nightlife doesn’t go all night like Reykjavik, but after we left the TEDx thing, Jane led the way to a backalley late-night bar and venue with posters for some very cool upcoming shows, like Giant Sand and Paws. After that, the final Glasgow stop was a local icon that I’d already heard a bit about, the Equestrian Statue of Duke Wellington, a very large statue that, for decades, has perpetually had a big orange traffic cone on its head. The government has taken steps to stop this practice, but the community has rallied around its defense – they want a cone on that thing, and they’ll fight for it. If you haven’t learned anything about Glasgow yet, just let that sink in a little bit.

Yeah, Glasgow made it onto my potential relocation list.