Our trip this time around was a bit less organized. We knew we wanted to go to Glasgow, but we didn't have a concrete plan for what we wanted to see. I had done some minimal googling beforehand, but we were all basically up for a real adventure this time around. So, with that in mind, we woke up super early (8:00 on a Saturday? Sacrilege!) and headed to the bus station on Princes Street. After much reading, laughing and a little singing for Phoebe and I (P.Y.T. and other Glee mash-ups), we pulled into Buchanan station in the city center of Glasgow!
My first impressions of the city was how much more modern it appeared than Edinburgh, which makes sense since Edinburgh is a world heritage city and Glasgow is not. However, the way they mixed the old and new seem artfully haphazard and the results were both interesting and oddly beautiful.
My second impression of the city, as we started trekking to the destination we came up with at the last minute - the Necropolis - was all of the street art around the city. As you'll see in the photos below, the street artists in Glasgow have a major advantage when compared to Edinburgh - and maybe even Chicago!
When we got to the Necropolis, expecting maybe an old crumbling ruin and not much else, we were surprised to discover a University campus with old, red buildings, Glasgow Cathedral (also known as St. Mungo's Cathedral) and an entire hillside full of eerie grey graves and monuments rising out of the mist. Glasgow's Necropolis is home to 50,000 corpses and was started in 1832. Since then, a number of influential Glaswegians have been buried there. The necropolis was built around a statue of John Knox that sits on a pillar at the top of the hill and was built in 1825. The necropolis is a beautiful and big part of Glasgow and there is a quote about it from one of its own, Billy Connolly who said, "Glasgow...doesn't care much for the living, but it really looks after the dead." The cathedral, however, is also super gothic. It was built in the 12th century and has the crypt of St. Mungo himself in the basement. Is anyone else hearing the thump thump of a telltale heart? No? Just me? Ah well...
(Glasgow Cathedral, John Knox statue at the top of the Necropolis, etc.)
The entire day was grey and really set the scene for the dark places we visited in the city. Overall, though we were disappointed by the rain that set in heavily during the afternoon, we had a wonderful time and loved our walk through part of Glasgow. We're hoping for another day trip during our stay to see over sides to this eerie city!
Oh, and I can't leave you without a bit of that Liz Boyd weirdness you all crave so much - so I'll bring up the statue of the Duke of Wellington that sits in front of the Museum of Contemporary Art. Built in 1844, the tradition to cap it with a traffic cone was started by locals in the early 1980's and has continued since. Apparently the practice has continued to show the sense of humor of the city and, despite many attempts to stop it, the traffic cone is always replaced. For this, it made Lonely Planet's 2011 list of the "top 10 most bizarre monuments on Earth". So there you go - your fun fact for the day!
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