I booked an unnecessarily early train from Edinburgh to Glasgow scheduled for 9:30am. When I collected the tickets from the machine it said it allowed any travel on the day, so I just got on the first train that was about to leave instead - they seem to run all day every twenty minutes or so.
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| The Duke Of Wellington statue, the traffic cone is a regular thing. |
So we arrived at Glasgow far too early for check-in obviously, but were able to drop off bags which left most of the day free. I tried to get the furthest activities out of the way before lunch, so took off for the local bus stop headed for Celtic Park. I found out I was just slightly short on coins for the bus as I was arriving, so had to go and buy some food from the supermarket to get enough change. The next bus arrived and we were in the middle of throwing a bunch of coins into this tray when the driver just waved us through impatiently, didn't even bother to count it, and it was probably a couple of pounds short still. It's pretty funny they still have such a manual process.
Successfully arriving at the correct bus stop for Celtic Park it was pretty deserted and very windy. I found somewhere for lunch and was considering whether to inquire about the stadium tour or not, but since I didn't see anyone else walking around during that time I decided against taking a possibly solo tour, which is a bit awkward for everyone involved (especially when you know nothing about the team). The team mega store was open though, which seemed larger than it needed to be, I'm not a fan of the team, although the green and white stripes look alright, so I just picked out a magnet instead.
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| Celtic Park. |
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| Also Celtic Park. |
Before heading back towards the city I stopped at The Forge shopping centre, there was nothing much there except for this huge Asda shop which seemed similar to a Wal-Mart, which would have taken half an hour to walk through, and two competing pound shops almost right next to each other. There was also a separate place called the The Forge retail park with a Sports Direct outlet, kind of like a cheaper version of Rebel, they had a rack of discount soccer shirts from 2014 but I didn't find any good teams. I really liked the old
Bayern Munich away top they were selling, but it was only in extra large.
On the way back into the city I just happened to walk past the Tennent Brewery. Now I hate beer, but the advertisements painted on the wall were fantastic, they even had a "fake television" attached to the side of a building which was running video advertisements as well! Just up the street was the Glasgow Necropolis, full of graves as you would expect. The hill wasn't particularly high so it didn't provide a fantastic view of the city, but the headstones and monuments through the grounds were interesting and it was a peaceful walk through a graveyard...
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| Tennent brewery. |
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| Also Tennent brewery. |
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| The necropolis. |
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| Monuments at the necropolis. |
Also nearby was the Glasgow Cathedral, naturally undergoing some maintenance work on the outside. It wasn't the biggest cathedral I've ever seen but there was a lot of stained glass and huge wood ceilings in the two main rooms, so it was still quite good. With all of that taken care of it was finally time to head back to the hotel to check-in, along the way passing many more street art paintings covering the entire sides of several buildings - it must be the Glasgow thing to do.
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| The cathedral. |
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| Inside the cathedral. |
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| Street art. |
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| More street art. |
I took another bus down to Glasgow Green, where a green is another name for a park. The park runs alongside the River Clyde, in the middle there is the Doulton Fountain and the People's Palace, where a palace is another name for a small two-story building with a Glasgow history exhibition and a Winter Garden (greenhouse) in the back. They even had old Glasgow Commonwealth Games 2014 merchandise still left over, sadly no magnets and most clothing was kid sizes.
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| Glasgow Green. |
Finally back to the city to end the day, walked along the River Clyde for a while before detouring through the Argyle Street mall and St Enough Square shopping centre. This time I waited long enough after digesting my nachos and fries from dinner before going for a evening run, ending up down near the Glasgow version of a docklands area which had been redeveloped recently as well.
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| Nacho. |
The hotel review:
- Crap key cards that rarely work
- Good downtown location
- Limited TV channels
- Very small room
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