Day 2: Walking Glasgow

I just wrote a Facebook status update that said "I like being around other people who cannot tan." I wrote it in part because it's kind of funny, especially after coming to terms with a lifetime of being mocked for how ghostly pale I am. But I also wrote it because it's been on my mind today that I keep running into people with hair and skin like mine-- curly reddish hair with a mind and will of its own. It's nice not to be the only one in a crowd who will sunburn in 15 minutes without a thick layer of SPF90.  As much as I try to ignore it, I must confess that there's more to the common hair and skin than the comfort knowing most of the room won't tell me to go get a tan.  There's something else about Glasgow.

My grandfather emigrated from Glasgow to Canada in the early 1900s when he was a very small child. I know it's easy to over-sentimentalise one's connections with the ancestral land so I've tried to put those ancestral connections to the side and just be present here. On the cab ride in, however, I was thinking about what in this city would have existed when he was a boy or when his parents were growing up.  Having decided there would have been very little of the Glasgow they would have known still in existence, I put it out of my mind. And I did for most of the day.  

One of the things I love about traveling with D, S&B is that we all love to walk. Today was almost all walking with a stop at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum and for lunch at ___.  We walked around the University of Glasgow campus a bit, strolled through the Botanical Gardens, wandered through a few street fairs and generally wandered around taking in the sights, moods and scenes of Glasgow. We also stopped at the Pot Still-- apparently the best whiskey place in town and had the two malts of the month.  Over the years, I'd not heard good things about Glasgow but recently people who I think are really cool have told me they liked it a lot.  It's a very interesting city and I wish I had more time here.  There are an awful lot of interesting things here and I'd like to come back and explore them.

 

One of the most interesting things we saw was an exhibit called How Glasgow Flourished: 1714-1834. It was there where I saw paintings, drawings and maps of a Glasgow closer to that which my great grandparents would have known and I tried to imagine what it might have been like to live and work there and where they fit into this increasingly complex social and economic system.  I was reminded that my great grandmother's occupation was listed as "french polisher": something I've always thought was very interesting for a woman of that time.  There was a segment of the exhibit devoted to the economics of a changing Glasgow.  B noted that so much of the economy was built upon the backs of exploited labourers like slaves and migrant workers both here and abroad.  I started to think about what roles my great grandparents would have played in that economy and wondered too, exactly why they left for Canada.  I also wondered what they would have thought about their red-haired descendant coming back these many generations hence and looking for traces of them, however small, wondering if Walt Whitman was right: "Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged/ Missing me one place search another/ I stop somewhere waiting for you."