Glasgow

I went over to Glasgow with the Edinburgh University Athletics Club for a track meet, and spent the following morning walking around the city. Glasgow is much larger and more modern than Edinburgh, and is really the commercial capital of Scotland as well as the center of Gaelic culture. Here is a photo of George Square, the city's central square. The statues are Sir Walter Scott (upon on top of the column) and Robert Burns, with the Glasgow City Chambers behind.

A statue of the Duke of Wellington with a traffic cone on his head. I had to look this one up, but apparently the cone is a bit of a tradition; they have long since stopped trying to keep the Duke cone-free. Pretty funny.

The Glasgow Necropolis. It's exactly what it sounds like.

I had more time to kill before my bus, so I wandered a bit, right into The Barras weekend market. The booths were selling everything from bootleg DVDs to old paintings to pies, but it was all cheap and kind of dirty looking. There were some thick Glasgow accents about, which was really what I came for.

I also came for lunch. I stopped in for a plate of steak pie, cabbage and mash at a little local place in the market. It was awesome.

Milano

I'll start by apologizing for the long delay; it's midterm essay season here in Edinburgh. That being said, I still found time to fly down to Milan last weekend for a bit of sightseeing. You might notice that this post is relatively short, only four photos. Milan is really more of a commercial city than a prime tourist spot, which I realized shortly after arriving. Most of the tourist sites are centered around the Duomo cathedral, which is enormous and stunningly beautiful, even against the a cloudy afternoon. Having seen quite a few cathedrals at this point in the semester, I can safely put this one up at the top alongside Toledo, and well ahead of Madrid.

The Galleria Vittorio Emanuel II, or a very old shopping mall. This is directly adjacent to the Duomo. It was quite the scene, with Prada and Louis Vuitton holding down the prime real estate in the center intersection. The domed glass roof was really impressive though, especially for a building that old.

The inside of the Sforza castle. It was massive.

And we caught up with my friend Hakeem, who showed us where the good food was.