Rotary Trip to Scotland

Friday 29 September
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I took the bus in to my vocational visit at Glasgow Caledonian University, where I met with various folks from the Media Studies department. It’s a small department and they focus on news and news reporting, but they have some interesting equipment – some of it older than what I used in college fifteen years ago and some of it brand-new. They have fourteen DVX100 video cameras! That probably means nothing to most people, but it’s a $3500 camera that has better image quality than cameras for five times that price. Go watch “Gi Ho Lo” via the link on the right of this blog site to see a DVX in action.
I met Jeannette for lunch and got to hear some of her story. She taught herself English in two months while studying at university in South Africa, and still managed to have good grades while not really understanding what was happening in class. Very impressive.
After lunch I went to the Transport Museum – which has exhibits on transportation (no, really?) and shows the evolution of each form. It’s a good place to visit if you are in Glasgow. I still had a little time to kill, so I walked across the street to the Kelvingrove Museum (which we’d all been to a couple weeks ago). I got to see the original “Christ of St. John of the Cross” by Salvador Dali.
It was raining all afternoon, but my long duster jacket (thanks mom and dad!) and my wide-brimmed hat kept me dry enough. I took the subway back to the bus station, and then managed to remember how to get home on the bus.
For dinner, we all met at Ming’s – a Chinese/Thai/Japanese restaurant in Glasgow. I’d already eaten there a couple weeks back, which our hosts found amusing as they never had and they lived there. The food was fine (Rearn Thai in Greensboro still has the best basil chicken I’ve ever had, this wasn’t even close), and Adrienne and I split some sake. And then we started dancing. There was a piano player playing mellow songs, so John (Melissa’s host) began dancing with Adrienne, then the staff moved a table out of the way, so I started dancing with Mary (Stuart’s wife) and pretty soon there were several of us dancing and it was quite fun. Eventually we got the hint to leave when the staff started to have their own meals next to us.

Scottish arachnid note of the day: I’ve seen hundreds of elaborate spider-webs all over bushes in the morning. Either there’s one very busy spider, or colonies of them in the bushes. We don’t see this in the States (at least I never have), and it occurs to me that this is where Tolkien and JK Rowling got their inspiration for the spiders in The Hobbit and Harry Potter.

Jason

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 1st, 2006 at 12:41 pm and is filed under Jason's trip updates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.