I'm in Glasgow for a few days, staying at my friend Kate's place in the West End. I first came here a couple of years ago, hardly ever having been to Scotland (incredible!) and never having been to Glasgow (shame!), but I really liked the city as soon as I landed - which is why I'm back.
Glasgow's one of those underestimated cities people are surprised to hear you're visiting: Liverpool, Lyon and Hamburg are another three I'd put on the list. The reason? It's exactly the same psychology that makes people dislike the Glasgow, Liverpool and Birmingham accent - pure snobbery, and a deep unconscious belief that places associated with the old industrial working class must be inferior places. To be fair, there's some ugliness about Glasgow - the M8 tearing through the city, the nasty high-rises jutting out of the skyline. But there's a lot to admire, too. The rows of solid, square-looking sandstone tenament houses appeal to the eye much more than the average street in England, for instance. Glasgow is much greener than strangers might expect, too - my walk through Kelvingrove Park to the fantastic Mitchell Library to write this post is as nice a walk as I could hope for. And the West End alone has nice things to offer when it's wet (which, just now, is most of the time) like the two cosy second-hand bookshops off Otago Lane (Voltaire & Rousseau is a mad place full of stacks of books lying on their sides) and the funky, hippy tea shop Tchai-Ovna, which has its own Wikipedia entry and flickr group. I'm taking it easy today, ignoring the Georgia crisis and the Olympics and having lots of lie-downs, so off I go now for a Yogi Yogi Chai before a hard evening with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
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