An attempt at making the best use of my time here.

One of the things I am beginning to regret in my time here in Edinburgh is precisely my time here in Edinburgh. Through a combination of poverty, inertia and an occasionally less than managable workload, I haven't been travelling as much as I would like and had planned. The thing about being in Europe, you see, is that everything seems so tantalizingly close--Scotland is only about the size of West Virginia, and the whole of Western Europe could be covered in about the same area as some Americans are willing to travel to tailgate. But there's all those hidden extras: travel time to the airport, flight time (a big consideration when the cheaper your ticket, the longer your layover--I've seen flights from here to Germany that last anywhere from four to fourteen hours), the fact that RyanAir keeps their costs down in part by building giant passenger silos an hour outside of any place you actually want to visit.

So I haven't gone anywhere. And I feel really bad about that, wasting this whole once-in-a-lifetime travel opportunity experience. Though, if I only feel the obligation because of the relative proximity, I'm forced to wonder why I didn't spend more time in Delaware growing up. And then I remember it's Delaware.

Anyway, in a halfhearted attempt to calm my own sense of rapidly wasting chances, I decided to travel over the weekend. Destination: Glasgow!

Ok, so Glasgow may have a little bit of an unfair reputation among us nambly-pambly, tea-sipping Edinburghers. Just to be clear, I was no beaten, knifed, shanked, curbed or otherwise assaulted in the course of my trip. Instead, I went to church.

The Cathedral in Glasgow is really beautiful, I think the only one that survived the Reformation largely intact, so it's got that going for it.

The graveyard on the hill just opposite the Cathedral is also really cool. It's called the Necropolis, or City of the Dead, and there's a very tall monument featuring John Knox eternally overlooking the Cathedral, so that both Catholics and Protestants can remain equally annoyed at one another (I didn't take a picture of that because it would have irked my flatmate/travel buddy, who has this slightly irrational thing about John Knox).

(If the picture looks weird it's because I took a panorama and also suck)

Then, being me, I needed to use the bathroom. We found the public restroom with relative ease (plus, finding public restrooms is like my own personal superpower) and I paid my 20p and the door whooshed open and in I went. Here's the thing about public restrooms in a lot of European cities: they are fully automated and programmed to lock down and disinfect themselves completely after fifteen minutes. This is reassuring when you are stepping into the antiseptic little cell, but less so as you sit and watch the seconds tick by until you risk being covered in burning blue liquid. It's also a little unsettling when you catch sight of this:

And when you realize that children are not allowed into the cell alone anymore because they were getting locked inside and hosed down (which, really, is that such a bad thing?). So that makes you pee a little faster.

And then, we couldn't really think of anything else to do. Glasgow is like other big cities, I think, where daytripping is really not a very good way to get a feel for the town as anything other than an anonymous, rushing mass. You need to spend more time in order to pick up a thread of the daily rhythm, and without that it is hard to really know what to do or see. I felt like more of a tourist than I have since arriving in Scotland, as in Edinburgh my attention was immediately on settling in for the longhaul. Still, it was a good way to spend a Saturday. And I feel a little better about not having done any proper travelling yet.

Do you know where I really want to go? Thailand.

Damn it.