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Nov. 24th, 2012
What I did at the weekend
Nov. 24th, 2012 11:12 pmIn celebration of it being six months since Julie's birthday (we postponed the celebration as she was horribly ill at the time), and the pair of us just needing a damn holiday, we booked a hotel on one of the Last Minute Booking sites and headed through to Glasgow on Friday evening. We do this about once a year, purely on the grounds that spending an evening not in the house is remarkably freeing, and knowing that we _can't_ spend the evening doing anything productive is somehow less stressful than knowing that we could, we just don't want to.
So we had a lovely relaxing evening at Mark's Hotel, where we also went about three years ago. That time we got upgraded (for no good reason) to one of their awesomest dual-level suites with a view to die for. This time around we weren't that lucky, but we did get a nicely comfortable room and a pretty good meal (although their restaurant isn't as good as it was back in ye olden days of ye relationship*).
This morning I woke up at 8am, because I'm apparently incapable of sleeping in**, and let Julie sleep on my shoulder until 9am, when she was woken up by a knock on the door from housekeeping, as we'd stupidly forgotten to hang the "fuck off" sign on the door.*** So I made her a cup of tea and we headed into town. We dropped my rucksack in at left luggage at the station with all of our stuff in, and headed off for breakfast. I made a Facebook request for assistance in finding somewhere nice to eat, and then selfishly checked on Tripadvisor before getting any useful responses, so we ended up at La Vita, where we had a Breakfast Scozzese****.
And then we headed off in search of bead shops. Julie's had a hobby of necklace-making for a while, and there's lots of things she hadn't bought online because she couldn't tell what the texture was like, or what the colour would look like under natural light. Glasgow has more bead shops than Edinburgh, so we went wandering off in search of them, made a wrong turn by The River Clyde and ended up opposite Glasgow College of Nautical Studies, where we saw this:
and I ended up asking on Facebook what I was looking at - turns out it's for training in SOLAS, basically a life-boat for escaping burning oil platforms.
We then decided that a train was probably in order, as we were now a couple of miles in the wrong direction, and snagged one out to The Number One Bead Shop, which was oddly a shop _inside_ a shop. By which I don't mean a counter inside a shop, but basically a fully built, walled-in shop that just happened to have been built inside an antiques warehouse. Which was a weird experience, because when we came out after an hour of Julie staring intently at small glittery things I was completely surprised to step outdoors, only to find myself still indoors*****
We then wandered down to the Science Centre, decided that another £10 each to go wandering around it was probably too much extra to spend, and so walked back into town to get dinner******. We walked all the way down to the Merchant Square along The Clyde and then along Argyll Street, before deciding we fancied Chinese and then discovering that all of those were about a mile back the way.
Along the way I got this shot of a bridge next to the SECC:
and was then promptly photobombed by a random wife:
And got a look at the construction site for Glasgow's new arena:
And then my phone died, so we ended up wandering in circles for about half an hour, completely failing to find the one we were looking for because it was hidden away in a side-street, and eventually ending up on Sauchiehall Street, where we finally found a Chinese restaurant, had some lovely food, staggered back to the train station, made it home, and then collapsed.
Two hours after we got in I went to Sainsburies, and my feet _still_ ache. Apparently walking 7.5 miles (I measured it) is more than they're used to - particularly when you add in a bunch of standing around. Still, I'm very happy to declare victory, as we both had a great time, and the exhaustion is probably more of a badge of victory than anything else!
*Trivia Fact Of The Week: "Ye" is pronounced "The", because the "Y" is actually a vestigial þ (or Thorn), an Old English letter pronounced "th". So whenever you hear someone say "Ye" as "Yee", feel free to pedantically remove their fun, if you're the kind of person who enjoys that kind of thing.
**I am already looking forward to breaking myself of this habit over Christmas.
***Seriously, could they not just _assume_ that on Saturdays, and only come in before midday if you've hung a sign on the door saying that you're the kind of person who gets out of bed early even when you don't have to?
****I seem to be developing a taste for fried tomatos, which I hitherto loathed with a fiery passion. Possibly this is because I recently went to two places where they didn't fry them into mush.
*****Ok, so I have the memory of a fruit fly. It was still pretty odd.
******Yes, we prioritised food over science. But Science Centres and the like tend to be mostly aimed at kids, so they're fun for me/Julie, but they don't tend to be terribly educational.
So we had a lovely relaxing evening at Mark's Hotel, where we also went about three years ago. That time we got upgraded (for no good reason) to one of their awesomest dual-level suites with a view to die for. This time around we weren't that lucky, but we did get a nicely comfortable room and a pretty good meal (although their restaurant isn't as good as it was back in ye olden days of ye relationship*).
This morning I woke up at 8am, because I'm apparently incapable of sleeping in**, and let Julie sleep on my shoulder until 9am, when she was woken up by a knock on the door from housekeeping, as we'd stupidly forgotten to hang the "fuck off" sign on the door.*** So I made her a cup of tea and we headed into town. We dropped my rucksack in at left luggage at the station with all of our stuff in, and headed off for breakfast. I made a Facebook request for assistance in finding somewhere nice to eat, and then selfishly checked on Tripadvisor before getting any useful responses, so we ended up at La Vita, where we had a Breakfast Scozzese****.
And then we headed off in search of bead shops. Julie's had a hobby of necklace-making for a while, and there's lots of things she hadn't bought online because she couldn't tell what the texture was like, or what the colour would look like under natural light. Glasgow has more bead shops than Edinburgh, so we went wandering off in search of them, made a wrong turn by The River Clyde and ended up opposite Glasgow College of Nautical Studies, where we saw this:
and I ended up asking on Facebook what I was looking at - turns out it's for training in SOLAS, basically a life-boat for escaping burning oil platforms.
We then decided that a train was probably in order, as we were now a couple of miles in the wrong direction, and snagged one out to The Number One Bead Shop, which was oddly a shop _inside_ a shop. By which I don't mean a counter inside a shop, but basically a fully built, walled-in shop that just happened to have been built inside an antiques warehouse. Which was a weird experience, because when we came out after an hour of Julie staring intently at small glittery things I was completely surprised to step outdoors, only to find myself still indoors*****
We then wandered down to the Science Centre, decided that another £10 each to go wandering around it was probably too much extra to spend, and so walked back into town to get dinner******. We walked all the way down to the Merchant Square along The Clyde and then along Argyll Street, before deciding we fancied Chinese and then discovering that all of those were about a mile back the way.
Along the way I got this shot of a bridge next to the SECC:
and was then promptly photobombed by a random wife:
And got a look at the construction site for Glasgow's new arena:
And then my phone died, so we ended up wandering in circles for about half an hour, completely failing to find the one we were looking for because it was hidden away in a side-street, and eventually ending up on Sauchiehall Street, where we finally found a Chinese restaurant, had some lovely food, staggered back to the train station, made it home, and then collapsed.
Two hours after we got in I went to Sainsburies, and my feet _still_ ache. Apparently walking 7.5 miles (I measured it) is more than they're used to - particularly when you add in a bunch of standing around. Still, I'm very happy to declare victory, as we both had a great time, and the exhaustion is probably more of a badge of victory than anything else!
*Trivia Fact Of The Week: "Ye" is pronounced "The", because the "Y" is actually a vestigial þ (or Thorn), an Old English letter pronounced "th". So whenever you hear someone say "Ye" as "Yee", feel free to pedantically remove their fun, if you're the kind of person who enjoys that kind of thing.
**I am already looking forward to breaking myself of this habit over Christmas.
***Seriously, could they not just _assume_ that on Saturdays, and only come in before midday if you've hung a sign on the door saying that you're the kind of person who gets out of bed early even when you don't have to?
****I seem to be developing a taste for fried tomatos, which I hitherto loathed with a fiery passion. Possibly this is because I recently went to two places where they didn't fry them into mush.
*****Ok, so I have the memory of a fruit fly. It was still pretty odd.
******Yes, we prioritised food over science. But Science Centres and the like tend to be mostly aimed at kids, so they're fun for me/Julie, but they don't tend to be terribly educational.