Glasgow is a city in Scotland. I didn’t really know anything else about it when I first signed up for the Glasgow Half Marathon, called the „Great Scottish Run“, somewhere around July. All I knew was that I was going to be in Edinburgh and that in order to get myself to run more or less regularly, I should sign up for a running event once in a while. And Glasgow was the first to pop up on Google.

Turns out, there’s much more to Glasgow than just a nice running opportunity. I decided to go there early on the day before, partly because I screwed up the registration and my equipment was sent to my place in Germany and I had to get a replacement package, party because I wanted to see Glasgow if I was going to be there anyway. It turned out to be just an hour and a cheap bus ride from Edinburgh, so it’s actually not that big a deal to get there once in a while.

Anyway. While driving on the bus through the Glasgow suburbs, I was amazed by how much it looks nothing like Edinburgh. While Edinburgh is old, medieval, confusing and rather rundown than rich, Glasgow is obviously younger, industrial, modern, built in chessboard-blocks and you can almost smell the wealth (to quote Katherine Price) in the city centre, while the suburbs look rather like the ones where Monty Python once sang „every sperm is sacred“. The city centre itself is surprisingly small. I walked around randomly on day one, and that is not what one should necessarily do in Glasgow, as it turns out you can walk pretty far without getting anywhere interesting in a city made of giant company building blocks.However once you find the actual centre, which consists mainly of George Square and the surrounding one square mile or so, it’s a quite pretty place for shopping (assuming that you are loaded), eating and watching Scottish people. The amount of actually Scottish-sounding people in Glasgow is amazing in comparison to Edinburgh, which seems to mainly consist of international students and tourists.

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Have you ever seen a Hairy Coo? Well, why would you. But that is not the actual point of this post, and we’re going to get to that later. The Hairy Coo Company organises bus tours throughout Scotland and to basically any place that a tourist might find interesting. I actually never heard of them, but a friend of mine did and since they offer a free bus tour which takes up a whole day and goes to some interesting places, we decided that we would take the risk. (Obviously, „free“ is somewhat uneconomical for a full day’s tour, so they expect you to pay a respectable „tip“ for their free services – however the concept of putting the decision of how much it’s worth in the visitors‘ hands is somewhat couragious and confident at the same time.)

We started at around 9 in the morning from the very centre of Edinburgh. That may not sound too early, but it was a Sunday morning and sunrise is already getting noticeably later here, so in some ways it felt like the setting of a zombie-apocalypse-movie. After a wee bit of driving, we ended up at the famous „Forth Bridge“. (This is not the Forth Bridge on the picture, but some railway bridge next to it, which is however way more beautiful than the Forth Bridge and therefore I chose this picture.) Anyway, this was just – as would many more of the upcoming stops – a photo-taking opportunity, and ten minutes later we were back on the bus and on we went.

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Zu den elementaren Fragen, die man eigentlich jedes Mal zu hören bekommt, wenn man jemand Neuen im Uni-Kontext kennenlernt, gehört: Und, was studierst du hier so?

Gute Frage. Zunächst: „Classics“ hat, entgegen volksetymologischer Intuitionen, nichts mit Musik zu tun. Und nichts mit Theater. „Classics“ in Großbritannien ist aber auch nicht das, was „Latein“ oder „Latein und Altgriechisch“ auf dem Kontinent ist. Es ist auch nicht „Alte Geschichte“. Am ehesten kann man es vielleicht mit „Altertumswissenschaften“ fassen, aber auch das bleibt wackelig. „Classics“ ist hier im Kern alles, was mit der Antike zu tun hat. Da ich ein Masterprogramm absolviere, habe ich dabei eine relativ freie Wahl, wie ich mich spezialisiere (oder auch nicht) und ob ich mich mit Homer, retro-attischen Fischgedichten, den archäologischen Überresten eisenzeitlicher Kuhherden, dem Fall des römischen Imperiums oder byzantinischer Kunstgeschichte beschäftigen will.

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