Glasgow Loves its Traffic Cones!

We have decided that the symbol of Glasgow must be a pylon, or fluorescent orange “traffic cone”. They are all over the roads here, and as is to be expected when surplus bright objects are readily available in the streets, come Sunday morning they are also hanging in trees, on poles, and to our great delight, on the heads of various important looking statues about the city. When I was searching for the Gallery of Modern Art, no one knew what it was, but when I said “You know, the statue of the guy on the horse that always has the traffic cone on his head”, everyone could point me in his direction.

Shocking, but we still have no flatmates! We still have the whole 3 bedroom, two bathroom place to ourselves! Though we have shared it with more than a dozen hospitality club guests already, we are still savouring the sweetness of this precious and fleeting position as sole occupiers of this mouldy, old tenement flat. But it must be something special as I can hear commentary floating up through my window as the hourly double-decker bus tour of the city passes below us. Our huge, drafty windows are also a prime parade-viewing spot and we appear to be on the usual route. Mike has been awoken to the noises of the annual 5000 strong “Motorcycle Action Group Easter Egg Run”, and I was roused from sleep by the St. Patrick’s Day parade, which had more police guarding it than participants. One block up from us is a lawn bowling green that we have yet to try out, and a great skate park. It has been exhilarating to watch the spring flowers blooming in the nearby park, beginning with snow drops, then purple and white crocuses, fields of nodding daffodils, the occasional tulip and bluebell, and cherry trees all a-white with delicate blossoms. But only recently have we been discouraged to note that Alberta’s sunny temperatures are creeping up, at 20 Celsius some days, while Glasgow is still clinging to the same 9 degree cloud as when we arrived in January.

Mike’s still happily well-employed with a temp agency that gave him a blissful two month long stint at IKEA. He brought home Swedish sweets and ciders nearly everyday, and soaked up the pampered Scandinavian working conditions that included an IKEA staff radio station open to requests, and all the lingon berry juice you can drink in an 8 hour shift. A few odd placements have crept in as well, such as city council canteens, and an elderly day care cafeteria, but we are both excitedly curious to see what British experiences will be chalked out for us as he begins working at the horse races next week. I predict he will return to Canada sporting a monocle.
Carli-Ann began her week on, week off job as a Personal Care Assistant for a couple in Dumfries. It was a great first week packed with memorable “cultural” experiences. Vivien regaled me with tales of her adventures on the Paralympic swim team in Atlanta '96 and doing the London Marathon. Dick is a biker who could empathize with the mind twist of driving and thinking in opposites, who whipped us up with my bike and his scooter to Dumfries’ elaborate mountain bike trails my second day out. Her little cottage has a name as the first line of the address, they have a (wild) hedgehog living in the back garden who leapt at the chance to plow into the food bowls of their two Miniature Schnauzers resulting in me having to deflea them before bed. And I survived the 3.5 hour drive to and around (and around and around) Britain’s 5th largest city of Leeds, mostly thanks to the GPS TomTom system programmed in John Cleese’s voice. The only times I screwed up was when he kept telling me to “Bear right, beaver left” round the roundabouts, which are available for your driving convenience in mini, regular, double, and the famed quintuple “Magic Roundabout” of Swindon. Thankfully, my driving instructor had focused especially on these exciting little whirlwinds of British culture, as well as killing my habit of turning on a red light. Our zip down to Yorkshire was for Vivien’s orienteering competition, the first day of which left me totally mystified as to the method in the madness of 4000 Brits in sweat bands, cleated shoes and crumpled maps grunting and dashing madly about a 12th century Knights Templar estate crowned by a Tudor-Jacobean mansion, gaping at clusters of orange and white dangling cloth boxes being peed on by the dozens of dogs loping after their masters. After Vivien illuminated the mechanics of the sport, my appreciation increased considerably the following day.
I am happy to report that the Joys have also kept me as part of their family for a few more months as their nanny on my off weeks. Paul (5) and Neil (2) are teaching me all about Scotland, their neighbourhood of Ascot Avenue, and the peculiarities of Glaswegian and British vocabulary: when colouring a picture of them I asked what colour were his pants and to my surprise was promptly shown…pants being underwear on this side of the Atlantic. I have recently provided no less than 36 “ARTS AND CRAFTS TIME!” ideas…I’m glad Paul is creative because the sources of my inspirations have just about been depleted! Neil (2) takes me trainspotting weekly, and to my delight, I was invited to share their “elevensies” which I thought was just a Tolkien creation for “The Hobbit”…and that very same evening I walked past Pippin himself near our house! The hobbit actor, Billy Boyd is a Glaswegian, but it was very peculiar to partake in elevensies and to walk past a hobbit on the same day.Between the job in Dumfries, being a nanny, working occasionally in the dementia unit, and with seniors in supported accommodation in a few different facilities, the prints on the pads of my fingers have nearly cracked open from all the anti-bacterial hand washing procedures. But we have added 744 kilometres to my bike odometer since mid-February, and several pounds of muscle to our thighs from carrying our precious bicycles up and down from our fourth floor flat twice daily.
Carli-Ann turned 27 Nessie-hunting and we’ve added conclusive photos to our Scotland folder! My birthday trip to Loch Ness was wet and grey, as it truly should be. The dark, whipping waters of the deep loch nearly convinced you that out of the corner of your eye something might be surfacing. We were taken on a short boat tour of the loch by a researcher who has been investigating the potential for giant creatures to survive on the bottom of Loch Ness since the 1970’s. The current trend is to chock it up to sturgeon, which can live for a couple hundred years and have been caught at 8m long. Mike’s birthday was a pretty low-key affair involving sloppy “courgette cake”, and samplings of the best ales in the land, particularly the Wyre Piddle Brewery’s “Piddle in the Hole Traditional Cask Ale”. From the label:“Piddle in the Hole” is traditionally brewed cask ale which has, until now, only been available in pubs in the surrounding villages, the names of which are featured in this rhyme…Upton Snodsbury,Peopleton and Crowle,Wyre Piddle,North Piddle,And Piddle in the Hole.”Another weekend when all the Historic Scotland sites were free, we bustled about the ancient capital of Stirling for the day, saving a total of $71CAD in entrance fees. The castle is a magnificent fortress, and I was intrigued to view the years-long process of weaving a copy of the 1500’s tapestry “The Hunt of the Unicorn”. At the Bannockburn Visitor’s Centre, Mike was trying on the chain mail of Robert the Bruce and William Wallace’s time, and then was found floundering at the back of the museum after everyone else had cleared out at closing time, struggling to escape from his 30 pound metal costume. A couple weekends ago we also journeyed along the banks of the lovely silver Loch Lomond and the snow-capped Highlands to the Isle of Mull and the Isle of Iona, where a 6th century monastery is still a functioning spiritual community. We had to race the three bus loads of old folks to the graveyard where Macbeth and 48 other Scottish kings are buried. They beat us back to the ferry though, filled it up completely, and forced us to wait for the next one. Vicious. The Highland cattle grazing lazily on the wind-swept heather bogs consumed many megabytes of memory on our camera, and we have decided that they must be the inspiration for the hip hair styles of the indie Glaswegian lads. Which reminds me that Corb Lund played in Glasgow in March and we caught the show at “King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut”. We never imagined there were so many Canadians in Glasgow, but they nearly filled the bar!
Our Glasgow lads introduced us to another Glasgow institution, The SUB-Crawl. www.subcrawl.co.uk Glasgow’s 110 year old subway is a dingy orange 15 station circular route of stale air (which still beats Edmonton’s half line), known as the Clockwork Orange. With ease, one can surface from any subway station and stumble directly into a pub, so we joined 25 of Glasgow’s finest young folk for James’ birthday and made a day of it. ‘Twas a long day indeed. Mike put the photos online - click here. We can even justify in including it in our broad category of “cultural experiences” due to the education we received as we entered the blue Rangers pubs and the green Celtic pubs. Depending on which neighbourhood we surfaced in, there was no mistaking where the loyalties of many pubs and patrons resolutely stood. Here’s a website worth a laugh about Glaswegian characters: http://www.glasgowsurvival.co.uk/, check out the people section.
All this workin and playin has nearly worn us out so we figured we were just about due for a vacation. Luckily our wanderlust coincides with Carli-Ann’s Grandma Betty’s scheduled tour of Italy, so we are off to Rome on Tuesday to meet up with her! We also threw in a few days in Sorrento for good measure. And since Carli-Ann can’t seem to be able to take a day off work without a plane ticket booking to keep her to it, we just got tickets to spend a week in Stockholm, Sweden for our summer solstice anniversary in June. We thought we would head even further north. Carli-Ann is still scheming about how we could pop over to Iceland before we leave Europe, but that might be pushing it a little.
And we are also very excited because we recently had our applications for working holiday-maker visas for New Zealand approved for next year, a process which was done simply over the internet. The only extra bit was that we had to go to a private hospital to get pricey chest x-rays to prove that we don’t have tuberculosis due to our choice of travel destinations, but Mike is thrilled to have gotten to keep the x-rays, which I am sure will be framed once we settle back in to Canada. Now we just have to figure out how precisely to arrive at this little paradise that is inconveniently located on the exact opposite side of the globe from Scotland. We have quite a few possibilities, including elaborate European and Asian and South Pacific and Round-the-World ticket options which Carli-Ann keeps dreaming up to try to squeeze every last corner of the earth into our realm of experience, but it will come down to how much more of Europe we want to see before we leave, and how much of our savings we will throw at the EU before sailing off! Our dear French friend and original hospitality club host in Dublin, Caroline and her boyfriend Ben will be arriving in New Zealand around the same time, so we will have some company down there!
And we have been looking even further into the future as well with some excitement. Mike has finally decided what he wants to take at university, so he’ll be applying to the engineering department at UBC for September 2007, which will put the brakes onto our global gallivant significantly. He’s thinking of going into something with energy conservation, so hopefully our future will unfold in this new direction with as much vigour as the last few years have doled out to us. So, Vancouver it will be, keeping our fingers crossed!
But first to Rome.