Beautiful Glasgow, Scotland: a photo blog

Yesterday I traveled to Glagow from Dundee to meet up with a friend from Rhode Island who was enroute to the Isles of Lewis and Harris (known for Harris Tweed) in the Outer Hebrides. Although the weather forecast almost always calls for rain in Glasgow, it turned out to be a beautiful, sunny, warm day!

A little cloudy in Dundee as I set out in the early morning:

Magdalen Green bandstand with construction crane behind; very symbolic of Dundee - the Green, and construction work.

The Tay Railway Bridge.

Part of a pretty awful poem about the Tay Railway Bridge: so awful, in fact, that it's celebrated.

Looking toward the Tay road bridge with very calm waters.

Leaving Dundee (also in Gaelic).

George Square, just outside the Glasgow Queen Street Station:

War Memorial in front of the Glasgow City Chambers.

Glasgow crest, in mosaic on the floor as you enter the City Chambers.

Beautiful mosaic on the ceiling of the City Chambers.

The Commonwealth Games "Big G" (the games, a sort of mini-Olympics, are happening in July), and visiting the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA):

Some publicity event at the "big G"

GOMA exhibit on female under-representation in science fiction movies.

Selfie in the GOMA mirrors.

A Little more Pop Art as I was walking around Glasgow

What else would you expect to find on Glasgow high street, but the Tardis?

Or maybe a Dalek swimming in the River Clyde?

Never mind, I definitely like the elephants better.

Though the fire cat is pretty cool too. 

The River Clyde was beautiful, as was the People's Palace on Glasgow Green.

Suspension bridge over the River Clyde in downtown Glasgow.

View of train bridge over the Clyde.

Crossing the suspension bridge

People's Palace Greenhouse view.

Inside the greenhouse, view from the cafe.

First Nations art from Canada outside the People's Palace; Glasgow is twinned with a Canadian city.

This is an old carpet factory, built to look like a famous Venetian building.

The front of the People's Palace, and amazing blue sky. Nelson column to the right rear.

Late 1800's fountain, recently refurbished, largest terra-cotta fountain in the world. That is Queen Victoria at the top.

Shakespeare tiles in the Ladies Room. Seriously.

One of the gates of the Glasgow Green.

A funny sign, more Gaelic, then time to head home.

In front of the court. All I could think was, "In the U.S. they would never build a wall with this kind of drop behind it. Some kid would fall, and his parents would sue."

Departing Glasgow Queen Street Station.

Sheep from the train.

Cows from the train. 

Back in Dundee: a closeup of the Tay Railway bridge. You can see the pylons from the "old bridge" that was taken down after a train derailed in the late 1800's.

Primary School Discos and Birthday Parties, oh my!

Picture of disco ball from Wikimedia Commons.

Just last night I didn't know what to write about.  But today when I picked Audrey up from her second birthday party in 2 weeks, it hit me. Discos and birthday parties, of course.  The disclaimer is that the information I have on primary school discos is secondhand.  I didn't actually take Audrey to this event - Paul did. But he told me a few things, which I pass on here.

I don't know about you, but in the U.S., the first dance I remember going to was about seventh grade (age 12 or so).  Not so here in Scotland.  Last week, the school that shares space with Audrey's school threw a disco, with everyone invited - P1-P3 (ages 5-8) from 6:00 to 7:15, and the older kids (up to age 11) a bit later. Paul said they had a real DJ, who played such crowd-pleasing favorites as "Let It Go" from Frozen (you should have seen it, said Paul - every little girl in the room started singing along) as well as things you could dance to.  The organizers also served typical "party food" - crisps (potato chips), sweeties (candy) and juice (blackcurrent and orange, the two juice flavors you see everywhere for kids). Apparently discos are not just for school, though - our friends who went to a family-friendly vacation park in northern England said there were kid discos there too - their 5-year old got dressed up and went out to dance.

Clipart of cake from Wikimedia Commons.

Discos I can see as a cultural difference - chalk it up to European influence. But kids' birthday parties should be the same, right? Wrong, and I'm beginning to understand the typical structure of a Scottish kid's party. though I don't understand the reasoning behind some of the party choices. First, the attire.  "Dressed up" seems normal to me (which is how some kids, including Audrey, dress for parties), but "Wear your Halloween costume?" It's called "fancy dress" here, and today there were three Meridas (from Brave, as you might imagine, a popular Scottish heroine), two Alice in Wonderlands,  one Sophia the First (the birthday girl), one or two who might have been Elsa , one possible Ariel and one possible Jasmine, plus assorted pirates, nurses, etc.   There's also the tradition (also present in Rhode Island) of not opening the presents at the party.  This seems odd, because if everyone brings a present, isn't it nice to open them and say thank-you? We always did this at my parties as a kid (at least that I remember), but maybe we were different from the norm in the 80's too and I just don't remember it. The final thing about Scottish birthday parties that I can't figure out is this: they always send the cake home in the goodie bag.  Granted, kids are eating the typical party food like crisps, sweeties and juice, so they're probably not hungry for cake.  But all the parties Audrey has been to, the cake is wrapped up in a napkin and either handed to the party guest or put in the goodie bag. They sing Happy Birthday, cut the cake, and then don't eat it. Audrey is quite sensitive to these norms, and when we have her party in a few more weeks, she may insist that we too send home the cake.  But right now we're thinking of putting a disclaimer on the invitations we're soon to hand out to her friends: Caution: Cake Will Be Served!

Loadsaweeminsingin, or my Scottish singing experience

One of the first things I did when I arrived to Dundee was to join a singing group.  After having not sung with any organized group since leaving Arizona in 2010, it was a priority for me to find a choir. Not only do I like to sing, I was (and am) pursuing some work-life balance.  Singing is for ME, not my boss or my husband or my kids. And I really lucked out.  Literally before we even moved into our rental house here in Dundee, I found a women's singing group (official name: Women's Singing Group) on the Internet.  The references to the group were a couple of years old, so I worried the group might not still be around, but the email address still worked and I was able to register over email, and get instructions to go to the local professional theater for a rehearsal the following Monday night.

I wasn't quite sure what I was in for. I had been in Scotland less than 2 weeks. But I wanted to sing, and these women were singers. So I walked in, to a room of approximately 40 women who all seemed to know each other very well, and who were not just "Women's Singing Group" but "Loadsaweeminsingin" (or Loads of Women Singing, for the non-Scots speakers :-). And then it turned out that all the singing was by ear, just a sheet of words in front of you, and no music. But a few ladies, especially Molly, a fellow soprano, welcomed me, and two hours flew by. I wasn't used to singing regularly, much less singing by ear, so I concentrated intently on parroting back what our tutor, Sarah, sang to us, and singing what the other sopranos (the ones who had been in the group for two or five or, in one case, almost 20 years) were singing. It was a lot of fun, and a lot of work.

Now that I've been in the group for seven months, singing by ear is a lot easier, though still frustrating at times.  I am amazed at the longevity of the group (we're about to celebrate the 20th birthday of this group in early June 2014), and how much singing with them teaches me about being Dundonian (from Dundee).  For the 20th Birthday program, we're singing 12 songs. Three are African, including Nkosei Sikeleli, the national anthem of South Africa, which the group has a history of singing. I actually even sang it with them shortly after Nelson Mandela died.  The other nine songs are Scottish, with an emphasis on the factory past of Dundee (Women O' Dundee, Alice's Song) and a local Dundonian singer/songwriter who recently passed away, Michael Marra. And of course, it can't be Scotland without a connection to Robert Burns - were closing our Birthday show with a song for which he wrote music and words, Green Grow the Rashes.

Without Loadsaweeminsingin, I would know far less about the history of Dundee.  I would know far less about the issues that concern Dundonian women, past and present. I would know far less about what a group of 40 (or more) determined women can accomplish with the help of an energetic tutor who knows each woman by name and brings out the best in everyone.  I still sing for ME, but with Loadsaweeminsingin, I also feel like I am singing for US, the women of Dundee.

To give you a bit of an idea of how Dundee's past shows up in our music (and to hear a bit of a Dundee accent), listen to Sheena Wellington singing Women O'Dundee   (note: I tried to embed this as a Youtube video but since I can only find it on Youtube UK, and Blogger only wants to go to Youtube.com...a link is it.  And if you can't figure out what she's saying, check out Words to Women O' Dundee, with some translation.

Four American Habits that Die Hard

So we have been in Scotland for about seven months now.  This is long enough, for me at least, to feel like we live here rather than just being temporary visitors.  I have adapted in a lot of ways, especially linguistically. I now talk about my garden instead of my yard, almost always remember to say trousers instead of pants, ask for a bus ticket to the city centre instead of downtown, and ask for my soup or cake "for takeaway" instead of "to go."  But it was that last bit (to go) that recently reminded me that there are a few American habits I have that die hard. I stopped into a coffee shop in the city centre to get a scone for takeaway, and the guy standing behind the counter said, after I ordered, "One scone to go." I was shocked, and told him he was the first person in Scotland I had heard say, "to go."  He was nonplussed, and his co-worker gave me my scone to go, and I went.

Inspired by "to go," here are four American habits, linguistic and otherwise, that die hard:

1) Chips vs. Crisps

Thanks to the Oxford Learners Dictionaries I can illustrate my problem (NAmE in the image  refers to North American English, by the way) . Despite picking up a variety of different terms, I have a very hard time calling potato chips anything but chips, and since I already have a reference for the word "chips" I find it very difficult to call French Fries by their British name.  Audrey has totally adapted, following her school friends' lead, but to me, a chip is a chip, and a fry is not a chip.

2) Walking the wrong way

I have finally mastered looking in the direction that the cars are actually coming before crossing the street.  This is not intuitive, it takes re-training of your mind and instincts, but since the consequences are relatively dire (being hit by an oncoming car you didn't see because you were looking the other way) I have been motivated to change my behavior.  However, walking along the sidewalk (or pavement, as they call it here) is a different story. I constantly find myself walking on a collision course with other pedestrians.  I stay to the right when I should be walking to the left, only being reminded to move by people walking straight toward me. Sometimes they just move to the side sympathetically, eyeing me as you would someone about to turn their car into a one-way street.  This is especially a problem on staircases - I come wheeling around the corner and nearly smack into people. And then I go back to trying to re-train my brain to walk where I am expected to walk.

3) Saying Good Morning or Hello

This is one both Paul and I run into every day.  For people that you see on a regular basis (work colleagues, church friends, singing acquaintances, people at playgroup, the local crossing guard) the Scottish form of address is generally "Hiya." But neither of us can really get our heads or mouths around "Hiya."  I usually say Good Morning, or Hello, both of which provoke a pause from people I'm addressing.  Paul points out that it might just be people reacting to our funny accents, but I think it's also a mental shift - she said Good Morning, not Hiya, so what do I say next?

4) Celsius vs. Fahrenheit

For this one it's not so much the day to day weather - if I read that it's going to be 9, for example, I have kind of an idea of how much chillier it's going to be in the morning than if it's going to be 13. But when you start telling a story, especially a story about Arizona, and it starts with "It was summer in Arizona, and it was 110 degrees..." and then you realize your listener has no idea what 110 degrees means, and you wonder, should I try to convert this to Celsius? Or just say it's really hot? I usually opt for the latter.

These issues may resolve as we're here longer  - who knows, by the time we come back to the States (or America, as they say here) we'll be totally Scottish and have trouble adjusting back to American terms and norms!

Post-Easter-Post

Today at church I heard a great children's sermon.  The regular sermon was good too, but I was struck by the children's sermon because the pastor did something I hadn't seen before. He told the kids he was going to talk to them about God's love, and sharing their faith.  And he proceeded to show them a sheet of paper on which he had printed, many times, the words "God's Love":

He asked the kids to count the corners on the paper (four, naturally) then pulled out a pair of "Sunday School scissors"..

...and proceeded to cut off a corner of the paper to share God's Love with one of the kids. He then asked them how many corners he had left - they said three. But of course, when he counted, he had three he had started with, plus two corners he had created by cutting off the fourth corner - so five corners. He got up to 10 corners by sharing God's Love, and he also showed the girl who took the first corner that she now had 3 corners, and when she shared with a neighbor, each of them had three corners. A great illustration, I thought.

A few other post-Easter thoughts - I spent Good Friday in St. Andrews, and it was an absolutely gorgeous day.  Between that day and sunny days in Dundee,  I have been taking a ton of pictures, some Easter-related, and some just arty.  A few of the more Easter-related are below. 

Churchyard, St. Peter's Free Church, Dundee	St. Peter's Free Church, Dundee
Church door in St. Andrews	St. Peters sign, Dundee
Dandelions on the tops of her shoes	Daisy Trinity
St. Andrews Cathedral	Exiting St. Andrews Cathedral toward North St.
Walking on Water...almost	Church on the Dundee-St. Andrews road with graveyard tumbling  down the hill

Happy Birthday, Great-Grandma!

This is my final post on the date April 20, 2014. The first one was about preparing for Easter in Scotland, the second about my in-law's wedding anniversary, and this one is about celebrating my grandmother's birthday.  It makes me a little sad that I rarely celebrated grandma's birthday while she was still living - it was often celebrated at the end of the day on Easter Sunday, if it fell close enough to Easter, but my family was always hurrying back to Virginia for school and work the next day.

But now, we celebrate. It was really Audrey's idea. Last year, after great-grandma Marguerite passed away in March, Audrey wanted to do something for her birthday. So, we made cupcakes. Disney Princess cupcakes, to be precise. And we ate them and said, "Happy Birthday Great-Grandma!" We might even have sung Happy Birthday. This year, Audrey remembered, and wanted to celebrate again. So she made a card, and we made cupcakes: Peppa Pig this time (local color, or should that be colour)

On the evening of April 19, we burned the card (or as Audrey said, "Fired it up") in our garden, and ate a cupcakes for evening snack.  Happy Birthday, Great Grandma! Hope the card got to you, and that you enjoyed the cupcake :-) Love you!

Great Grandma taking the girls on walker rides: Thanksgiving, 2012