Week Two (Feb. 11 - 17, 2007)

• I celebrated the end of my first week in Glasgow with a good part of the Bridge Group down at a local bar. Mel and David Slater, my other manager, bought drinks for all. They’ve been treating me really well here!
• I feel more and more comfortable in the city…one night I actually gave out directions to some local skateboarding street punks (NED’s as they’re called locally – Non-educated Delinquents). At first I thought about faking a Scottish accent when they approached, but I’ve been told my contrived accent sounds more like “posh English.” I thought better against the accent…the guys thanked me for the directions and ambled on their way.
• I now understand 62.3% of Glaswegian speech in conversations the first time something is said to me.
• There’s a huge rivalry in the city between the Rangers Football Club and the Celtic Football Club (aka soccer clubs). Both are local teams (the “Old Firm”), but they’ve historically been supported along sectarian lines – Protestants generally with the Rangers, and Catholics with Celtic. I’ve been advised to say I root for Partick Thistle if anybody asks – nobody hates Thistle, who play in a lower division and don’t seem to be a threat on either the soccer field or to anyone’s path to salvation.
• After gritting through some particularly mind-numbingly tedious sections of the British Standards for structural steel bridge design late in the week, I finally made my way down to Starbucks to try the local version. It was surprisingly good – but that might have just been in comparison to what is normally choked down in the office: coffee reconstituted from freeze-dried crystals and made with water from the office faucet labeled, “not drinking water.” Seriously.
• I haven’t started driving in Scotland yet, but I went to the bookstore to get the Highway Code to study. It’s mostly the road signs that I need to familiarize myself with. I still have moments walking around Downtown where I’m startled to see kids or people sleeping in the driver’s seat of passing cars…then I realize they’re in the passenger seat.
• Occasionally I see these “wee” (Scottish for little) cars are so small they can legally be parked perpendicular to the “kerb” without sticking out in traffic. They’re so tiny the passenger seats double as Starbucks cup-holders.
• I finally found a place with free wireless internet access: the Mitchell Library. This fantastic place supposedly houses the largest reference library in Europe. Fortunately it’s only about 10 blocks from my current downtown flat and they have low standards: They gave me a library card after only a couple days in the country.
• This weekend I rode the Underground to visit two popular (and free!) museums in Glasgow – the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and the Museum of Transport. Both are world-class and packed with loads of treasures. The Kelvingrove even had an early Picasso mounted low to the floor so “kids could better enjoy the artwork.” I liked how many of the paintings had short descriptions next to them (for the benefit of engineers?) which clearly explained some of the subtle symbolism. It helped made the artwork more interesting and engaging.