Glasgow has a good vibe. There is a certain feeling that just sort of permeates the air of a really great city - it's hard to describe exactly what it is, but it's what makes this whole travel thing worthwhile. And all my favorite cities have it, from San Francisco to Chiang Mai.
We arrived in Glasgow on a Saturday morning Ryanair flight (about 40 bucks, including all taxes), parked our bags at the hotel, and commenced with poking around. Glasgow, a former industrial center, does not have the sheer volume of historical buildings of a place like London or Edinburgh, so it is not instantly recognizable as a fun place for tourists. But the streets were full of people just strolling around and hanging out. We passed by an intersection and I felt my travel sense tingling. So we hung a left onto Buchannan Street.
Buchannan Street has been completely converted into a pedestrian-only zone, and it was packed of shops, local people, bagpipers and other buskers, and just a few scattered tourists like us. This was not Covent Garden, given completely over to the tourist business - it was alive, energetic, and living on its own terms. And as Saturday afternoon progressed into Saturday evening and eventually Saturday Night, it began to fill up. With 15-year-olds.
Glasgow has a club scene, a bar scene, and a live music scene (which gave the world Franz Ferdinand, amongst others), and they were all rocking on Saturday. But the bulk of the patrons, in their finest clubwear and hipster clothing, seemed to be mostly teenagers. Old people like Lee and myself, while present, were in the minority.
We had a few drinks at cowboy-themed bar, complete with potted cactus, and then caught a rocking show by a band from Dundee called Mercury Tilt Switch.
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3 comments:
Glasgow has a big under-18 club scene on a Saturday. A lot of the larger clubs will open from 5.30 till 9.30 to let minors boogie in a relatively safe enviroment.
A side-effect of this is an afternoon dominated by gangs of kids from various teen cultures, roaming the streets and generally strutting their stuff.
I assure you that later on the shifts change and the grown-ups come out to play!
yeah &?
are we under 18s not allowed to have a good time now & again?
jesus christ!
I'm a 16-year-old girl from Greenock. My 3 friends and I were looking for an under-18's nightclub, but there are none in Greenock. We had heard about Boho in Glasgow, but have heard some off-putting stories about the club, and young girls being sexually assaulted and even raped. We were also concerned to hear that the club's security guards, who are much older men than the under 18's, tended to be very, "touchy-feely" with the under-agers, which completely put both us, and our parents off the idea of going to the nightclub!xx
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