Who needs Paris when you could have Glasgow! - Seriously?!
This has got be a piss-take.
Who with any taste visits cities "for the shopping"?! I lived in Glasgow for 14 years. After the closure of Borders Bookshop, I used to avoid Buchanan Street as far as possible because of the noise and crowds, only making exceptions to get to Forbidden Planet and the Greek restaurant on George Square.
And to be blunt: I would rather visit Paris because, unlike Glasgow, it is alive for me with the memory-traces of historical and literary characters I adore, people whom I've loved for most of my life, from Julian to Villon to Max, and all the characters in Hugo's and Dumas's fiction… Edinburgh does this for me, too, with a lot of 18C characters. But not Glasgow. Too modern and commercial; there's very little left that's pre-Victorian, and the Cathedral is in a dodgy area (shades of Saint-Dénis). It's got no real soul.
Who with any taste visits cities "for the shopping"?! I lived in Glasgow for 14 years. After the closure of Borders Bookshop, I used to avoid Buchanan Street as far as possible because of the noise and crowds, only making exceptions to get to Forbidden Planet and the Greek restaurant on George Square.
And to be blunt: I would rather visit Paris because, unlike Glasgow, it is alive for me with the memory-traces of historical and literary characters I adore, people whom I've loved for most of my life, from Julian to Villon to Max, and all the characters in Hugo's and Dumas's fiction… Edinburgh does this for me, too, with a lot of 18C characters. But not Glasgow. Too modern and commercial; there's very little left that's pre-Victorian, and the Cathedral is in a dodgy area (shades of Saint-Dénis). It's got no real soul.