The man himself Mr. Mackintosh
Later today, we’ll take a music-themed walking tour of the city and then hear our first music event of the trip.
But for now, I am going to finish up last night’s adventures.
We are staying on the sixth floor of a lovely old Edwardian building originally built as the headquarters of the Anchor Line Shipping Company, a transatlantic passenger service founded in 1855. It has been tastefully converted into an apartel, sort of like extended stay in our lingo. It has a tiny kitchen with just what you need to fix yourself breakfast or a simple dinner. A small loveseat at the foot of the bed, both facing a large screen tv wall unit. A large en-suite bathroom with a HUGE shower. There are a couple of windows overlooking the adjacent ornamented rooftops plus a distant glimpse of the snow-covered highlands. There are a couple of bar restaurants downstairs (neither of which serve breakfast).After a cab ride from the airport and checking in, we walked around our neighborhood to get the lay of the land.
Before we left home, I created a custom Google map with different layers for music venues, vegetarian restaurants (lots to choose from), pubs that serve “real ale” (micro breweries), and one layer for street art (the Glasgow Mural Trail) along with other sites of photographic interest.
Our first evening wander around the neighborhood included dinner, so we hit the first location on my map, a place called Stereo. Not only was it a highly-rated vegan restaurant, it was also located inside a Charles Rennie Mackintosh-designed building.
Down the lane as they call it (service alley to us), there were two wall art pieces.
After filling up on the first real food in 24 hours, we walked around the town in the quickly fading daylight . We found the local Tesco Express and grabbed a few things to fit out the kitchen for morning drinks and breakfast.
We went back out to find a local establishment for a nightcap. We landed at the Drum and Monkey. It use to be an old bank back in the day. Now it is a busy pub. We were really surprised with how busy this part of the city was during a weekday night with so many places filled up.One of the things we noticed on our rambles around the neighborhood is that some of the restaurants and pubs had outside seating even in the winter, which in Glasgow consists of mostly rain and ice. Not much in the way of actual snow, being so close to the Atlantic. The Highlands and Islands which we flew over as we came into Scotland were blanked in white. One could easily see the demarcation zone, snow up there, frost line, with the city below.
Amazingly, we were able to capture a good number of photos of the city’s wall art from my map today without much effort. More about that artwork later.
The walking tour was super fun. Lots of interesting info about the music scene from the 50’s on down to today. Visited a good number of locations, and ended the day at the historic and musically famous Scotia pub. At one point along the way, the guide led the Glaswegians on the tour (about a dozen of them) in a rousing rendition of the Jelly Piece song, aka the Height Starvation song. The back story is that mums in the old 2- and 3-story tenements used to toss down sandwiches from their windows to their kids playing outside and then say it was time to go to school. As these tenements were torn down and people were relocated into 20-story buildings, it wasn’t so easy to toss down sandwiches from new heights. And that led to the rather comical song that was sung, whose full lyrics, a Matt McGinn rendition, and period video footage can be found on Rob Lightbody’s web page. Note: the locals only sang one of the many verses along with the chorus. The other locals on the street (aka, the passerby) were all commended the tour group on their spontaneous performance.
Music event will keep us out late tonight so our review of that will be included in tomorrow’s blog.
