UK Trip - Glasgow, Part Two
Glasgow World
Out and about in Glasgow, the first thing I notice is that people underdress for the weather. Thirty degrees (0 Celsius) and guys are walking around in T-shirts, women in miniskirts. I am the only one wearing a hat (and four layers).
The accent takes some getting used to. From what I can hear the short "i" turns into a short "e;" "Six" sounds like "sex," "fish" becomes "fesh" and "Jimmy" is "Jemmy."
I don't see anyone walking around while drinking a coffee; I'm not sure if that's incidental, or if this place is like Japan, where if you walk around eating and drinking you look like a freak and people chase you with pitchforks.
Nevertheless, I need some joe to go. I enter a cafe, but before I order, I remember that on my first trip to the UK people referred to coffee like it was a race: Black coffee, white coffee. I also remembered they don't say "to go," they say "for take-away." So instead of asking for "Coffee to go, milk no sugar" I say
"I'll have a white coffee for takeaway, please."
"Right," says the countergirl. "Would you like Hommecher-komech in it?"
"No thanks," I say, figuring Hommecher-komech is some spice I've never heard of that they put into coffee here.
The girl stares at me. Clearly I've said something wrong.
"Um, what exactly is that?" I ask.
"Well," says the girl, slowly and patiently, "you'd like a white coffee, and the melk I put into it is either hot melk or cold melk."
Ah.
Another minor linguistic thing I have to get used to is people often say "aye" here as an affirmative, like when you ask the bus driver "Does this stop and so-and-so," he goes "Aye." At first I thought they were saying "I."
The puerile part of me wants to ask them questions like "In the alphabet, there's a vowel that comes after 'H', right?"
The teens in Glasgow have a flyness to the way they rock gear. It's almost black American. Not in style; I don't mean that they look like white kids in Midwestern America who are trying to dress like what they see in hip-hop videos, I mean that Glaswegian youth have a way of taking improbable clothing combinations and rocking it in such a way that it looks...fly. Difficult to describe. I probably should have taken some photos of them, but you know me, people photos ain't my thing.
Scotch, however, is my thing. One night Elaine takes me to a store called Odd Bins, a liquor store chain. The whisky room in the back has the Scotches broken down by region. I make a beeline for the Speyside shelves and my eye is instantly drawn to an unfamiliar label, something I've never seen on the racks back at Astor Wines & Liquors in the Village: A Benromach "organic" Scotch.
"Ah yes," says the store clerk, when I ask him about it. "It's quite young, sex years," he explains. I ask him about the "organic" part, and he says it's made from pesticide-free crops and barreled in "ecologically managed wood." I figure I'll never get to taste this stuff back in Manhattan, so I snag a bottle and pay for it.
After ringing it up, the clerk disappears for a moment and comes back with something wrapped in white cloth. He lays it on the counter and unwraps it. Inside is a small glass vial filled with amber fluid and capped with a rubber stopper. "A little geft for you," he says, setting a narrow snifter on the counter and pouring a wee dram. "Try thess. From my private stock, I haven't got very much so the one glass'll have to do for the two of ye. It's a nineteen-year Benromach cask-strength."
Elaine, not a Scotch drinker, takes a small pull and makes the noise a person makes after you've pulled them out of the water, resuscitated them using mouth-to-mouth, and they've just come back to life.
Unfazed, I slowly tip the glass back and let the remaining three-quarters slowly trickle into my mouth.
woooooosssshhh
pupils dilate
feet lifting off the ground
cue Radiohead's "Nice Dream"
As what can only be described as a powerful Scotch whisky Starburst infuses my senses, I'm like, seeing the fireworks Bobby Brady saw when he kissed Millicent.
Some first photographic impressions of Glasgow, below. (By the by, are the photos too big, would you prefer a link? Let me know.)
Up next: Glasgow Captioned