St Andrews & Glasgow

January 7, 2013:
We stopped for breakfast in Edinburgh at the Patisserie Valerie, a cafe done up in the most kitsch French-style (see the Bridal Shower scene from Bridesmaids) and they served porridge with maple-flavoured syrup. Insulting both my cultures in the same figurative breath!

We took the bus to St Andrews, Talaira's mum's favourite place in the whole world. We visited the Old Course (which claims to be the birthplace of golf), picking up a souvenir for my dad who had just had knee surgery that day, before stepping out onto the beach in the pouring rain.

For once, I was clever enough to bring my umbrella! Our handy Scottish guidebook recommended seeing the castle and cathedral ruins. We couldn't be bothered to pay for them, so we just looked at them over the fence and loitered in their gift shops. We also saw bits of the University which Will and Kate both attended (it's where they met and fell in love). Apparently, it's the oldest Uni in Scotland. To get out of the rain, we spent the remainder of our time in St Andrews at an awesome indie restaurant called Victoria's Cafe.

The decorations were amazing and they even had board games! Our server, Callum, is originally from Edinburgh, but he had the strangest mix of accents I've ever heard. He was the only person we met on entire trip that was actually from Edinburgh. We had fajitas and a cocktail called the Southern Strawberry Jammer or something to that effect and it actually had strawberry jam in it. This was place was totally hipster. The drinks were even served in jam jars. Mmmm.

Back at the hostel in Edinburgh, we met Linda (another Australian) who was casually cross-stitching. We bonded over sudoku, terrible music playing on a loop for hours and how our dorm room smelled like boys. It was such a lovely casual evening.

January 8, 2013:
It was happy days when we arrived in Glasgow the following morning to meet our friend Lauren. Lauren had come to our university two years before this on an exchange and loves Canada (almost as much as Einar, I reckon). She toured us around to see the Necropolis, the Glasgow Cathedral, St Mungo's Museum of Religious Life & Art (which turned out to be an incredibly interesting museum, which was also free) and to see the smallest door in Scotland. The original house was built in 1472, so apparently people were much shorter in those days.

While she was showing us George Square, we were approached by a TV crew and asked to do an interview for their website about changes happening to the square. It was quite funny as we hadn't even had a proper look around at that point, and they were asking us to give an opinion on what we thought of the changes. We made it online here!

We also got to see some Glaswegian icons such as the Nelson Mandella statue with its signature pylon...

... and we visited the Gallery of Modern Art where they had handprints of André Breton and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (all you litterature buffs understand why I find this exciting) and lots of abstract and multi-media art. The only thing about Glasgow is that it's almost impossible to understand the accent. Lauren could moderate hers a bit and some of the other people we'd met who had also spent time in Canada, but there was an incident where we'd gone into a shoe store and one of the retail workers asked us if he could help in any way, but we had no idea what he was saying to us. Talaira and I made it through dinner on our own, though, stopping at a cool place called BLOC+. As good as it was, I was aware that I was really starting to miss French food. Everything was starting to seem really heavy and I was looking forward to getting back to Lyon.

We went out for the night with our other post-exchange friends, Taylor and Nicola, stopping briefly at Lauren's work to play some arcade games. We even won some prizes for being awesome at Deal or No Deal! Taylor's accent was true Glaswegian. He was telling us about a burger joint that sells 2 for 1 burgers for students, but they have more "exotic" types of burger meat, such as "whaled" boar. We were perplexed. Was it a whale or was it a boar? Eventually we realized that he had been saying "wild". Poor guy didn't hear the end of it! We started at a bar called Sleazey's where we met Lauren's friends Alan and John (it was John's birthday) and finished at the first proper night club we'd been to all month, called "Garage" (which you can imagine is pronounced completely differently than Canadian English). When we walked in, they were playing Elvis music upstairs. The reason I know I am now completely obsessed with "rock" music is that I couldn't suppress my excitement and was genuinely disappointed when we went downstairs instead.

Our first impression came courtesy of a very drunk young man groping Talaira's leg. We were then accosted by the sight of another very drunk young man in a kilt trying to pick up girls in the middle of the dancefloor. It was an excellent time in spite of the house music, and we had chosen excellent party-going companions because everyone was a stellar dancer. Happily for me, they played one unbelievably amazing rock song, but I didn't have a chance to write down any of the lyrics. It will remain legendary.

January 9, 2013:
We slept in until forever o'clock. Just intime to catch a gorgeous sunset over the river, it seemed.

The armadillo music hall and the crane (in the photo above) are Glaswegian landmarks. Glasgow is kind of grungy, but I think that's what makes it Glasgow, and it was honestly one of my favourite places on the entire trip. We somehow lucked out with amazing weather for our whole time there.

For dinner at Frankie & Bennie's, I was brave and had fish and chips....

....and it was delicious.

We spent the evening bowling at Lauren's work. I am a terrible bowler, but it was hard to believe myself after I pulled of random spare after random strike to finish with a 106. We played 7 rounds.

 The scores were as follows:
Game 1: 106-72 (Tessa-Talaira)
Game 2: 85-75
Game 3: 54-62
Game 4: 57-98
Game 5: 78-106
Game 6: 56-91
Game 7: 78-89

I was certainly more convinced by the end of the night. I was also convinced, however, that Talaira practices on weekends for just this sort of occasion. It was a last night well spent in Scotland. We watched The Day After Tomorrow with Lauren and then tucked in to get some rest before our flight to Paris!