Glasgow

Glasgow is a city where it seems there are two kinds of people: those who live to drink beer and cheer their soccer team, and those who confuse you by having that hard Glaswegian accent yet are cosmopolitan, sophisticated, cultured, and hardworking.

The first Glaswegian I met was from the first group. He was a cabbie who spent the entire ride insulting me for being an American because Yankees don’t go to pubs and drink lots of beer until late at night. If you venture into a rough neighborhood after dark — as I did one night — it seems the entire world is populated by angry people with dead-end lives, like that cabbie. Crammed into bars, they leer at passersby who don’t want to join the mosh pit.

But the next morning, with the sunshine came a world of that second type of Glaswegian: people with vision for making Glasgow an on-the-rise city with a purpose.

Buchanan Street is part of a Glasgow pedestrian shopping zone called the “Golden Zed” for the way it zigzags through town. Just strolling up this street — listening to buskers, enjoying the people-watching, and remembering to look up at the architecture above the modern storefronts — was a delight.

Glasgow’s city center has a stretch nicknamed the “Golden Mile.” Rather than letting graffiti artists mess up the vibe with random or angry tagging, the top street artists are given entire walls to paint. These paintings are almost sightseeing destinations in themselves.

Throughout Great Britain, you can see red boxes on the streets that people back in the 20th century would enter in order to make “telephonic” calls to each other. They would put coins in a slot, turn a rotary dial with a sequence of numbers, and then speak through a device connected to the machine by a flexible pipe. These red boxes (which smelled like urine and doubled as handy places for the neighborhood prostitutes to stick their advertisements) were produced for the entire British Isles by a factory in Scotland. Now they are commonly seen no longer on the streets, but decorating nostalgic pensioners’ gardens.

In recent years, I’ve really been enjoying what I consider the “second cities” of Europe. The Chicagos of Europe don’t get a free ride, and they lack the blockbuster attractions and charming sights that bring everyone to the big-league cultural capitals. These “second cities” often have a rough, Industrial Age heritage that dug them deep into a rust-belt hole with the coming of the Information Age, but enabled them to be honest,  unvarnished, and nonconformist. My list of European “second cities” includes Porto in Portugal, Naples in Italy, Marseilles in France, Hamburg in Germany, Antwerp in Belgium, and Glasgow in Scotland. I find all of these much-improved lately — underrated and great to visit. (Yes, Glasgow’s population is bigger than Edinburgh’s. But given that Edinburgh is the capital and dwarfs its rival from a tourism perspective, this travel writer considers Glasgow an honorary “second city.”)

In part because of my love of Edinburgh and in part because I don’t get to Scotland much, I’ve never seriously considered Glasgow. I thought I’d like it because I liked the Andy Capp cartoon, which I thought was set here. But when I got to Glasgow, I found out that Andy actually “lived” in Newcastle (south of the border, in gritty North England).

But with or without Andy Capp, Glasgow has a wonderful energy. And, being less an hour from Edinburgh by train (with four trains per hour), it’s an easy day trip. I’d say your best “day three” in Edinburgh is to side-trip here for “day one” in Glasgow.

Midway through a very full morning with my guide, Colin, I stopped for a coffee. The busker across the street had charisma, and the people-watching was endearing. Just as I was thinking, “This is so great…where are the Americans?”, two women burst into my video to tell me they’re taking one of our tours.

Enjoy two minutes with an extra-hot latte on what I think of as “the Ramblas of Glasgow”: Buchanan Street.

If you can’t see the video below, watch it on YouTube.