Week 1 (Feb. 4-10, 2007)

After living as a Glaswegian for 3 weeks (with 23 more to go), I figure it’s about time to take some notes of my adventures in Scotland and abroad. (I don't see an easy way off the bat to put captions with my photos...Photo 1: The kitchen of my apartment in Glasgow. Photo 2: My apartment building is on the left, on the corner of St. Vincent St. and Pitt Street.

• Arrived at Glasgow International Airport around 7:00 AM local time on Sunday, Feb. 4. I expected to have to chase down a taxi, but Mel Sime, one of my Glasgow managers from Jacobs, surprised me at the terminal with a personal appearance to drive me to my temporary apartment in the city. Very classy, and set a nice tone for the beginning of my time in Scotland.
  
• I’ve been staying the first month in a serviced one-bedroom apartment right in the heart of the city, next door to Jacobs’ office. For my assignment, my company provides accommodation and local transport to work. The place is small at about 510 sq. ft, but it’s got just about everything I need to get by. Somebody even comes in around noontime to clean it everyday (they must have gotten the memo from Karma). The kitchen even has a dishwasher and combined washer/dryer squeezed into a couple cupboards under the counter. The downside of this place is that they charge an equivalent of $6/hour for internet access (or $50/day), and it costs me around $4/minute to call the US from the phone, which is metered just like a payphone except that it only takes credit cards – no coins.
  
• There are somewhere between 400-600 people in the company’s office across the street from my apartment. The people in my performance unit are friendly and helpful, and seem a bit curious that an American is working in the office. Scots are known as extensive travelers, and apparently it’s traditionally been much more common for them to work abroad rather than having visitors work here. Yes, I occasionally do have trouble understanding the dialect, but fortunately my hosts are patient with this slow American. No, there are no bagpipes playing in the office, and I’ve yet to see anyone wearing a kilt at work. I understand both are typically reserved for more formal occasions, like a wedding, funeral, or soccer match. The males wear suits and ties to work everyday, which is a change from the more casual style I’ve experienced in the states.
  
• I’ve been assigned to the Bridge Group, and am currently designing a relatively small, single-span half-through steel truss pedestrian footbridge/cycleway over the Airdrie-Bathgate railway. The current single-track railway has been abandoned for about 50 years, but Scottish Parliament has indicated that reconstructing an electrified double-track line is a high priority for establishing a quicker and more efficient train route between Glasgow and Edinburgh. The fundamentals of physics for analyzing a bridge obviously don’t change between countries, but I’ve found that there are a lot of differences in the design codes and standards which dictate how the detailed design is to be done.
  
• I’ve found that Glasgow is compact and accessible, with many places and neighborhoods within an easy walk. Within a fifteen-minute walking radius from my apartment in the city, I can reach two major train stations, two rivers, a handful of (free!) world-class museums, several shopping centers and pedestrian malls, and over half of the subway stations on the Underground loop. Every day after work I make it a point to walk around somewhere new.
  
• Glasgow is really expensive for an American (even a Seattleite). I knew that the $ / £ (dollar/pound) exchange rate was around 2 / 1, but I naively figured that with the global trade network, the actual prices of things would even out somewhat. No, things really cost about twice as much as what I’d expect to pay in the states. On the morning of my first day of work, I realized I didn’t have shaving cream. I scrambled outside to find a store, knowing that I’d have to probably pay a bit of a premium for buying at a “convenience” store in the downtown core. After passing up the first store selling the can for equiv. $9.00, I got a bargain at the second store, which sold me the can for equiv. $7.50. Even hamburgers at normal sit-down restaurants (McD’s and BK excluded) run between equiv. $8 and $22. I can’t help but convert all prices in my mind to dollars, since I still receive my US salary in dollars without a per diem stipend.
  
• Back home I look at internet access like a bathroom…available in about all private locations, and although not always available in public locations, if you look hard enough you can find a free one. That doesn’t seem to be the case here in Glasgow. Although the number of coffee shops seem to rival Seattle or Portland, I haven’t found a single one with free wi-fi. T-Mobile appears to have a monopoly on those systems, and they charge about $45-$60/month to access their network from the shops.