After my last post, when I derided American shopping malls, I decided today to pip on over to the Buchanan Street Gallery a mall in the City Center of Glasgow. Buchanan Street is closed to traffic. It is a market center smack in the commercial district of Glasgow, stretching four or five blocks, and lined with small shops, eateries, and pubs. It’s like a slightly crappier version of just about any town center/shopping area on the Continent, only without a mustachioed baker with the outrageous Continental accent. Here the bakers sound like Robert Carlyle.

The mall isn’t much: it is three small floors of shops catering largely to the teen and early twenties demographic. In the middle of it is a Boots. At first I was intimidated by the rather rough looking fourteen-year-old girls standing menacingly outside. I watched a show on female hooligan violence last night on one of the British cable channels and it has made me a little wary of getting a beat-down by a pack of teenagers. I gathered my courage and made past them as quickly as possible.

In Boots I bought two kinds of soap. I have become something of a germaphobe since arriving in this city and my Hughes-like hand washing, always a present part of my life but frequently in remission, has come out in full force as I have to touch lots of things in public. I’m exactly thirty-six hours away from touching everything with a tissue.

To get to Buchanan Street, you take the Subway (subway – not tube), which consists of two loops that go around the city. One is clockwise and the other is counterclockwise: it’s that simple. To contrast the simplicity and perfection of the Subway, the Glasgow bus network must have been designed by a toddler. Any logical person can’t possibly figure it out - defies all reason. I spent twenty minutes trying to figure out what buses took me where and I ended up throwing the map across the room and walking an hour in the rain to arrive at the desired location.



After procuring my soap from Boots and strolling a bit in the shopping district, I made my way back to the old homestead. Tonight I have a pint of real ale and a curry on my radar. I will let you know if there are any disastrous consequences.

I wanted to mention Real Ale as an unofficial endorsement by Wee Isherwood of CAMRA, a British organization determined to making us all better beer drinkers. CAMRA is an ugly and sloppy acronym for The Campaign for Real Ale. I won’t post their website, for that would be an official endorsement, but you can google the name and see what you think.

The British and Scottish palate for beers has changed in the last thirty or forty years and has gravitated toward a preference for Continental lager beers. Most of these are mass-produced big names like Carling, Stella Artois, and Carlsberg. They are rather expensive to buy here compared to some of the more famous bitters and stouts.

The mission of CAMRA is to reverse the trend and to get more Britons and Celts consuming real ale made with real ingredients: organic beer as a staple of the diet, how it was before things got all weird after WWII. In premise, I agree whole heartedly with this mission, as it helps small brewers get their products, often superior and much more interesting on the palate, to consumers who otherwise would be wary of drinking the warm and classic ales of yore.

One more day until this week’s postcard contest is finished: post your question in the comments section or e-mail me. The photos are of the Uni and the Kelvingrove Art Museum last night.

Ian