Glasgow

It's not a bad train ride from London to Glasgow. I took an early train because it was literally fifty pounds cheaper and oscillated between reading and staring out the window. Tiredness and excitement vied internally- I remembered loving Scotland the last time I was there but I hadn't slept well in the large dorms in Paris and London and so, though I stared out the windows with anticipation, it was difficult to bounce around as one is said to do when excited.

Glasgow Central train station makes my top three favorite train stations (you know you're backpacking around Europe when you have favorite train stations). I arrived before my check-in time, so I enjoyed some Starbucks internet and watched the pigeons harass passengers before walking down a couple of blocks and catching a glimpse of the Clyde River before walking into my hostel.

Here's a hint, if you're ever planning on doing something like this yourself: If you have the option and the funds, pick smaller hostels. Big hostels might have... well... well, actually, the only thing bigger hostels have that smaller hostels don't is an excess of floors. You can find a kitchen, laundry and free internet at smaller hostels and in smaller hostels, you actually get to meet people. In a big place it's easy to get lost among the crowds of school groups there on holiday or packs of friends traveling together with no need for another person. I hate being excluded like that.

Thus, I was quite happy when I found myself in a smaller room than requested- I was in a four bed room instead of a fourteen bed dorm. Through lucky happenstance (by the way, did you know that our word happy has its roots with the older English word hap, or by chance?) I was in a room with, among a rotating door of others, two girls my own age, one of whom was a musician (the aforementioned Bec Sandrige, who you should go give a listen to now) and the other her friend just visiting in Glasgow for a few days to support Bec at her shows.

It's crazy nice to come back to a room with people you like to be around. It's ridiculous the amount of empathy you develop over the course of trips like this- I understand much better the feeling a body can have when you don't want to go home but you don't have anywhere else to sleep. And so I was, again, delighted to have good roomies. I went out to see Bec perform at a venue one night and loved it, and spent the rest of their time in Glasgow enjoying chance meetings at the hostel even after they had to book another room.


Other than that, much of my time in Glasgow was spent walking over to the Starbucks with the internet and catching up on things. I'd go down to the river on less rainy days, watching people walk, bike, stroll, skate and sit on calm paths that bore witness to the night's excitements the next day. I went up to the cathedral and wandered through the Necropolis, walked through museums and shuffled through shops, spending every day other than my Sunday when I visited two churches just outside of Glasgow with a friend, in town filling the time between the early sunrise and the late sunset. I read.

It's amazing how caught up a person can get in the news and thoughts of the world around them. It does not do for me to have that much extra time on my hands, spotting potential TARDISes that turned out to be ice cream shops and musing on my trip long before it's over. I spent an afternoon in a bookshop, having become determined to buy Looking For Alaska, sitting and reading from my two new books. I had to put Looking For Alaska down. The talk of summer heat in Louisiana made me homesick. I had to put the internet down for a while too. Thinking over the headlines made me worldsick.

In the end, though, I was glad to head on to Edinburgh. Eventually, even the destinations become part of the journey and you start to look at the days on the calendar like hours on the train, carrying you along to a not-too-distant end. Oh, distant enough, I guess. But approaching.