A Welcome to Glascow

Day 4: I finally got a journal today, here in Skye, Scotland. It is 12:48am. In actuality I suppose it is day 5, but as I refuse to edit my mistakes it shall remain day 4. I'm sitting in a cozy chair of a very pleasant (if simple) bed and breakfast, drinking a cup of the best Scotland hot cocoa I've ever had (it's pretty much like any American hot cocoa with the notable exception that both the cocoa and myself are in Scotland). So far it's been one hell of a trip, and we've only just begun.

Scott and I left America the night of Friday, June 18th, and set down mid-day of the 19th. We expected to meet our parents the following day, which left us an overnight to wander and explore the large Scottish city of Glascow ourselves. The first thing that we noticed, during that long hour and a half that we spent lugging our luggage back and forth along the same lengthy streets in a confused attempt to find our hotel, is that Glascow has been constructed utterly without logic.

Our hotel was in the middle of the city, and from what I've seen Glascow city seemed pretty much like any big city I've ever seen in America, with a few minor differences. The most major of these is that just about everyone is white. This was actually kind of disorienting to me. In every other major city I can recall, minorities are pretty numerous. In D.C. I'd guess far more than half the population are clearly not from Caucasia. This absence of diversity isn't something I would have expected to rattle me, but it did.

Another big difference here is the traffic. I think most people know of the obvious differences. Cars drive on the left side of the road (somehow deeply disturbing, and not something I expect I will adjust to). Cars are tiny in comparison with American cars (we saw what looked to be a van except it was smaller than Sando, my station wagon). What most people do not know is that pedestrian conduct is a bit different in Scotland. The pedestrian signs take an eternity to say "walk", but when they do, all cars are given a red light. In essence, the walk symbol is the pedestrians’ personal green light, and they can walk wherever they please during it. Of course, this is not so easy to figure out when you're actually there, and no one bothered to tell my brother or myself what in Reagan's name was going on. The first time I watched people cross the street diagonally, walking without a care in the world as cars all around them revved their engines, I just thought people in Scotland were crazy.

Glascow shares D.C.'s talent in making street navigation into a game of chip's challenge. Thus if you are on a straight road starting at point B, with point A a block behind you, the road is almost certainly a one-way road. If you wish you get to point A, though it is merely a block away, it will most likely take roughly twenty minutes travel time (even if you do it perfectly and don't get lost), because the roads are appear to be the brainchild of Hitler.

However I have not yet mentioned the most annoying aspect of Glascow. The most annoying aspect of Glascow, and the reason my brother and I spent an hour and a half dragging our luggage back and forth along the same 5-block stretch, is that for some reason addresses are not displayed on most buildings. All buildings must, we've concluded, have addresses (we have the address to our hotel, so we suspect all the other buildings must have one too). However, for some inexplicable reason, they are displayed on only 1 out of every 20 buildings we saw (this is a very generous estimate, across the 5-blocks we found only 4 addresses). The 4 addresses we did find were laid out in a manner that managed to turn us around not once, or twice, but 5 times -- each time thinking we'd found new proof as to what direction the addresses were going. What a city...