Well, it was another laid back day for the most part. It was the dreaded laundry day. Packing light for this trip meant bringing less and choosing wisely, just enough to get us halfway through. Thanks to their all-in-one washer dryer unit, where “dryer” isn’t really the right word, it was an all day event. We got our first sense of the “dryer” with some rain soaked clothes earlier in our first week here.
After our usual late start, we check on it every hour or so. We left it on its own for a little ramble around our couple of blocks looking for photo opps and trying to scout out a dinner spot before the show this evening. Which would be Eddie Reader followed by another late night after hours session at the Glee Club .
We have a lot of thoughts and photos stacked up that didn’t really fit into our standard daily post, so I thought today would be a good place to put them cuz I am sure you don’t want to hear more about the laundry.
Street music
It appears the street music starts about 10:30 every morning. Some days, it’s different solo bagpipers of varying levels of skill. Yesterday, it was an accordion player playing along with an audio recording. Another day it was middle eastern sounding music. Sometimes, it’s just a singer or two. They run the whole way up and down Buchanan Street every block or so, finding a good overhang to help the acoustics of their instrument of choice. As one would expect, there are people protesting various causes, once in a small demonstration march in front of the hotel. And of course, the usual devil-dodgers handing out Bibles, Qurans, or just wanting to talk to you about their particular god.
Gum
A very poor example of the amount of gum covering the walking and driving surface. In this case a well designed bike lane.
Scotland must have the largest market of gum chewers in the world and possibly the universe. There is no corner of the sidewalks or streets not covered by old stale gum spit out by their chewers. I have never seen so much gum covering a city in all my travels. At first glance one might think the city was covered with pigeon poo, because it is a city and pigeons happen. But then you’d quickly realize with all the winter rain and wind that poo would be gone in no time.
What all this gum is like in the summer heat is like I can only imagine, a mine field of stickiness. Then again maybe it doesn’t get hot enough to reactive into it former sticky state. And I am sure some of you are saying to yourselves Deb’s got to be exaggerating to make this post even semi-interesting, but you would be thinking wrong.
They even have a campaign for putting spent chew into receptacles. And we saw someone whose job it is to rid the sidewalks of the stuff working a sidewalk.
So far this campaign has not really taken off so well. At least from what I saw on this visit. Maybe the streets are actually cleaner than before.
Man working with power hose to remove petrified gum bits on a sideway with a power hose. From where we were standing you could see the bits becoming dislodged and flying into the air.
Speaking of pigeons, we have some that have claimed the decorative stone balustrade outside our 6th floor windows as their romance spot. Paul gets up from his sleep most nights (early mornings really) to interrupt their rambunctious noisy overtures. They must be very use to being shooed off cuz the mere sight of anyone approaching the window sends them off into the air looking for a new landing spot.
One of the amorous pigeon neighbors.
Now for the evening’s music with Eddie Reader at the Pavilion Theatre.
A lovely old building who has seen lots of great acts in its day.
The inside was surprisingly beautiful. Lots of grand details and old style box seats.
The first act was a singer songwriter, Robin Adams (sorry no photo). He was very good with nice strongly written songs and a nice voice to go with them. Eddie and the band were great, yet another night of different music. Songs, funny stories (as the Scots are known for) and the full audience singing along upon request. She being a Glasgow native shared amusing stories that the locals could relate to. And while we are not natives, I could relate to some of the stories based on my own family experience though with a different accent. She played a few of her classic songs along with a Robbie Burns song because it was his birthday the day before. Everyone left happy. While we were in the queue waiting for the nearby Glee Club to open, I heard a few different comments about how they didn’t recall her being so funny. Maybe because I heard her live recordings, funny stories was something I was expecting and would have been very disappointed had she not been.
At the Glee Club, we were treated to a Friday full house of young revelers. The places are so crowded that it’s very hard to get a good photo especially at the Glee Club, so with bear us on our concert photos please.
Hildaland started as a duet of mandolin and fiddle which got the crowd warmed up as it continued to grow.
The trio AEvestaden
They next brought out AEvestaden, a lovely atmospheric music trio from Sweden and Norway. The sound was mixed poorly for their instruments (basically, only the bass came through) and they lost the audience midway through their set to conversations and wandering around. As usual, the audience was kind when they left the stage. We were thinking they would do well in Iceland at one of their outdoor music festivals). They’ve just released a CD, so I am going to look them up after we get home. The little that I could hear I really liked.
They were followed by Kinnaris Quintet, an all-female fiddle band that took the roof off the place, got people back on their feet and dancing. There were still 3 bands remaining to play when we left for home just before 2. We had some toast with jam, a cup of night time tea, and posted the blog.
