don't walk around at night

Glasgow is pretty far north, more northerly than you'd think. Here's a map of Glasgow Vs Other Northern Places.

You will note that Glasgow is close to Iceland, Norway and Sweden and kind of on par with Canada. I'm from the Northeast of America, which is (relatively) much more southern. While this explains the fact that it's always cold - I had no idea that we were so far above the inhabitable parts of Canada - a side effect of being this for north, there is not a lot of sunlight during the winter months. Seriously, in December the sun set at like 3:30pm - you get maybe 7 hours of sunlight on a good day. If it's raining, which it might be, you might not get sunlight for days. It takes some getting used to! (I would not recommend having Seasonal Affective Disorder here.)
Okay! So what is the #1 piece of advice for living in a city? "Don't walk around at night."

As you can imagine, this isn't very helpful, because it means that you can never walk around after 4 pm. (Obviously there are places in a city - any city - you shouldn't walk alone in at night, and I know that.) This strikes me as being rather inefficient, especially as the places I would be going are safe/well lit - I live quite near the big shopping streets (the high streets, as they're called here) and if I'm coming from/going to another major part of the city I'll be on public transit, so I generally try to disregard this warning, but I've studied rape stats and all that long enough to not be a little bit wary sometimes.

Luckily, the sun's been setting at more reasonable times (4 pm) now that we're inching into springtime. However... this means that in the summer, the sun will stay out laaaate - like 10, 11 pm late. All this nighttime takes some getting used to; I imagine 10+ hours of daytime will take some adjustment too.

but we are 78% water, even our pumping hearts

While the rest of the world seems convinced that the world has ended due to last week's 5 inches of snow over six days and yesterday's sudden onslaught of a proper New England-style snowfall for about 3 hours, prompting the university to strongly urge me to "not venture out of university buildings" (verbatim quote) and not one but two snow days in the past few days, I am generally unfazed, and therefore the only one in the office so far this morning. In fact I'm relieved that things are back to normal.

Come have a cup of tea with me, as we're out of coffee, and I have about 6 more cups of tea to drink throughout the day to stay awake anyway.

And I never love England more than when covered in snow

Strathclyde is on a mega death hill - a fairly steep one. (I don't know who thought that was a good idea.) All of this snow - all six inches of it - is making everyone nervous, so I have a snow day today. I can kind of see why they're worried about people falling and dying on the hills. Glasgow Uni is at least flat.

But I have things to do - I'm trying to get as much done as possible before I go home for three weeks. Also, I refuse to take a snow day for less than a foot of snow. So I'm headed here this morning:
Does this make me a New England Weather Snob? You bet.

little cream soda

submitted without commentary: signs in Tesco

it's beginning to look a lot like a new england winter

it's snowing! (this is the view from my sitting room.)

Do you guys remember when London was in the news last year for days because it snowed and nobody could handle that? It's like that. Apparently it rarely snows in Glasgow, because it's never cold enough to snow, so it's very exciting. Nobody knows what to do with it though!

Get off the Internet! I'll meet you in the street (ii)

So I bet you are all waiting with bated breath to find out if I was severely accosted, etc this weekend. SPOILER ALERT: I was not. TAKE THAT 1997! (if you are confused, go back one post.)

Both of the girls I met were wonderful people and we're arranging a second meet up. Like, it's scary at first (how are we going to recognize each other IF WE HAVE NEVER SEEN EACH OTHER? Should we exchange phone numbers? You already have my real name. WHAT IF YOU KIDNAP & RAPE ME) but basically, meeting people from the internet is inherently awkward. How can it not be? You know their personality and things about them, and you obviously have things in common, but a lot of it was really first-date-like. So what do you do? How long have you been in Glasgow for? TELL ME ABOUT YOURSELF. Except you don't need to do all the awkward subtleties of trying to impress the other party because you effectively already know each other. It's really strange, but cool to put a face to the name.

But you know what, it was a lot of fun. I'm looking forward to seeing them again. And, If anything, I keep getting better and better at introducing myself to people over the span of ~1hr. (Frequently I meet with people for about an hour or so via Grad School Networking - tomorrow I am meeting a girl from Glasgow Uni's Gaelic & Celtic languages department for coffee; we're doing some similar research.) Can I put this under "communicates effectively" on my resume?

Get off the Internet! I'll meet you in the street

Do you guys remember how, way back in 1998, it was determined that if you used your real name on the internet or you gave out your email address to strangers, someone would TRACK YOU DOWN AND RAPE YOU?

Only 12 years later I am using my real name on the internet with much consistency - between my column (now mostly defunct), my twitter account and my email address (yes that is almost my full legal name!)

This weekend I am meeting people from the internet! In real life! I need to back up a little bit.

I read a website called Autostraddle, which you should check out if you like a lot of the same things I do. Anyway, they ran an article about meeting other lgbtq girls, which rapidly became a Meet Other Autostraddle Readers sort of situation. (I followed their advice and saw JD Samson of Le Tigre fame play a show last night with her new band MEN, and met some gays there. So far so good! Also can we pause to discuss how I was sharing airspace with JD Samson.


...


continuing on, now.)

This was great and actually kind of beautifully timed. I've been here long enough that I'm ready to start feeling comfortable Being A Gay Here, but I have to find them first. (My American gaydar keeps getting thrown off by straight men who are clearly rocking some gender ambiguous alternative lifestyle haircuts, sunglasses, and tight pants.) Even though this is obviously a pretty queer city, I'm not quite ready to go myself to a gay bar. I live near a whole bunch of them, but they're kind of intimidating and mostly full of gay men. I'm brave but not that brave!

But I am e-brave, and it would be awesome to have some gay friends who clearly are intelligent/interesting. And besides, people meet on the internet all the time, through online dating sites, Craigslist, "tweet ups" and other such things. So I added my email address, saying that I had just moved here and don't know any gays ... and got a few emails from some other Autostraddle readers in Scotland - a few in Glasgow and one in Edinburgh, all of whom were very friendly people!

And so today I am meeting one person for coffee and another one on Sunday for brunch/coffee. 2010 YOU GUYS. The Internet is truly a magical place - between email, facebook, skype, twitter, blogs etc etc etc it is bringing us all closer together.

but if you never hear back from me again i was probably violently kidnapped & raped via 1997. So we still run that risk, but it's a risk I'm willing to take.

and you in your autumn sweater

It's starting to feel like autumn around here, which is exciting! Previously it was just raining and being warm a lot. Now it is cold and raining! No, just kidding, we've been having some really sunny days lately.

I really like Glasgow a lot - I can see myself being here for a long time, I think - but for now I live in the city centre, where there are no trees. No, that's a lie, I can see a couple trees on my way to my office, but it's not the same as a Proper New England Fall. (Glasgow Green, where I took this picture, is a park about 10 minutes away from where I live. Sometimes I go over to Glasgow University and get jealous of the beautiful West End of Glasgow, complete with trees everywhere.)

I've lived in New England for 22 years, and while I think I am pretty much over homesickness at this point, but I do find myself being surprisingly homesick for New England fall. I think living in New England ruins autumn everywhere else for you.