A short trip to Scotland
Six weeks of semester break passed by really quickly, my first holidays in my student’s life. It has been calm and quite weeks, despite of two winter holiday skiing trips to Austria and Czech Republic with my friends and my family. But at the very end of my free time there was another highlight waiting for me: a two-day-trip to Scotland with my best friend Maria attending Glasgow University there in summer 2010.
In the early morning of Monday, March 29th 2010 we boarded our Ryanair flight from Berlin to Edinburgh. Actually these short flights are geographically senseless and ecologically totally unconscious, but unfortunately we only had two days for our travels. Around noon we arrived in the capital of Scotland with its beautiful “Old Town” surrounding famous Edinburgh Castle. The weather conditions have also been typical: around 5°C, rainy and windy – horrible, but the beautiful city made our day!
While Maria went to the Scottish Writer’s Museum, I visited the Scottish Parliament. Since my Canada Year 2008/2009 it is my personal tradition to see parliament buildings, as it shows a lot about the political history of a nation. And this makes the Scottish one a very interesting place, as Scotland is something in between a part of the United Kingdom (with England, Wales and Northern Ireland) and an own sovereign country. The opinion about the national identity of Scottish citizen divers, but the majority of the people I talked to saw themselves Scottish with a British passport. The Scottish parliament can make laws about issues dealing with Health, Education, Housing, Transport, Police or Fire services, but the key competences for taxes, national defence or the benefits systems are still at the UK Parliament in Westminster, London. The actual ruling party (Scottish National Party) is working on a referendum about the total independence of Scotland from Great Britain in 2011. But even if there really will be one, the result is not to be foreseen, as a guide in the parliament told me.
But despite of these discussions the Scottish culture lives on the streets of Edinburgh. The permanent bag-pipes-music out of almost every store is some kind of annoying after a while. Everywhere you can see traditional chequered clothing and from time to time even some brave Scots walk around with a kilt. In order to be one of them I am a proud owner of a real Scottish kilt and a hat now, too. I am looking forward to the next Father’s Day bike tour and the next carnival.
In the evening we kept on travelling to Glasgow by bus. The trip only took about an hour, but it was a demonstration of the rude Scottish way of bus driving. I spent 25.000 kilometres or 14 full days on Canadian and American busses all over North America, and I always arrived in positive mood – but after this hour on Megabus throughout the Lowlands of Scotland I felt sick like never before. Additionally, by shoes were soaked in water and totally broke. And as soon as this rain-snow-like awful windy weather welcomed us in Glasgow, we only wanted to see a warm shower and a bed instead of walking through the city for 20 minutes.
But fortunately our Couchsurfing Host invited us to her little flat in the West End of Glasgow. Her father is half-Vietnamese and half-French, her mum is from Malaysia and England and she was raised in Scotland – a real cosmopolitan identity that doesn’t ask for a clear ethnic background. She is a symbol of the new world and a good basis for long and intensive talks about the world making the evening a good one.
Tuesday’s subject was to explore Glasgow. Maria left early to attend the Applicant’s Day of her university. Around 10 am I was leaving the flat to see by daylight what I guessed at night: A grey working-class city, the complete opposite of Edinburgh, hardly any typical old Scottish buildings, hardly any attractions in the “City Centre”. It is for sure an industrial city with mostly industrial areas, motorways and social housing areas. I want to be respectful and objective, especially with regions I saw just for one day. And the bad weather might also play an important role in my personal opinion, but Glasgow is really one of the most unattractive cities I have ever seen.
I started my day with buying new shoes, finding a place to donate my old ones and having a sandwich at Subways. The highlight was definitely the university campus, a quite nice one surrounded by a park and with the really old clock tower building in the middle. It reminded me a little bit of the Hogwarts castle in “Harry Potter”.
The day in Glasgow ended with a snugly snow storm and it almost spoiled my positive mood. The bus trip to Edinburgh was like an excursion to paradise. There are only 100 kilometres in between the two biggest Scottish cities, but there are so different from each other!
The ending of our tour to Scotland was not that gorgeous, indeed we had a great host in Edinburgh welcoming us in her little flat, but our flight back to Germany departed on Wednesday morning at 6:30 am! That meant getting up at 3:45 am and strolling through rainy morning Edinburgh to say goodbye from Scotland. In the afternoon of March 31st we arrived well back home and the sunny 10°C in Berlin felt like summer to me! But despite of the bad weather and Glasgow the trip was worth it, especially because of Edinburgh and my new real Scottish kilt.
31 March 2010
Posted in: 2009-2013 - Weimar, Trip
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2 Responses
Gut, dass Du das mit Glasgow geklärt hast! Ich wollte da auch mal hin, aber das Reiseziel wurde soeben gestrichen. & gut wieder von Dir zu lesen
! Schick ist es hier geworden! LG aus Whitehorse__Benita 
Naja… wenn das Wetter besser ist und man mehr Zeit hat, findet man sicher noch die ein oder andere schöne Ecke der Stadt. Also fahre vielleicht trotzdem einmal hin. Und ich hoffe, dir gefällt es gut im Yukon – aber eigentlich ist das eine ziemlich selbstbeantwortende Frage
Also viel Spaß noch in Kanada und ich erwähne nicht, dass ich ein bisschen neidisch auf dich bin 
Liebe GrĂĽĂźe,
Marcus
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