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My first visit to Scotland was a whim; I decided to take a week off before starting a seminar tour through Denmark and wanted to go somewhere new...

Glasgow, Edinburgh, Scotland

Hank Shiffman
2003-11-26 17:22:20

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Glasgow, Scotland

My first visit to Scotland was a whim; I decided to take a week off before starting a seminar tour through Denmark and wanted to go somewhere new. I settled on Dublin and either Edinburgh or Glasgow. Everyone told me to go to Edinburgh. So off I went to Glasgow. (Contrary? Me?) I did finally get to Edinburgh two years later, which makes me wonder; am I the only person on the planet who likes Glasgow better?

The college I attended has a long if not terribly significant history. (Although founded in 1829, RIT's degree programs weren't accredited until some time in the 1960s.) And the campus has no history at all, having been newly constructed on 1300 acres of swamp just a couple of years before I arrived. Which leads me to wonder what it must be like for students at a prestigious pile like Glasgow University; to wander through halls that once saw Alan Turing, mathematician and inventor of the Turing Machine and the Turing Test and founder of the Turing Institute. Or Lord Kelvin, physicist and inventor of the kind of extreme cold that RIT students know so well. What was it like before the Kelvin scale, when -40 seemed cold? Somehow it doesn't seem right to shiver when the thermometer reads a balmy 233 degrees.

This falls under the heading of "Don't judge a book by its cover". I walked by the front of this building a couple of times without particularly noticing it. Then I walked down the street behind it and noticed the smiling fellow on the right. What I had discovered was Glasgow's brand new Gallery of Modern Art, a place filled with bright colors, sound and motion. (You mean there's a kind of multimedia that doesn't involve a computer screen?) The gallery is a classic example of reusing an old structure for a new purpose and making it work. It's also a lot of fun, and far less stuffy than San Francisco's proud new addition.
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