Day 18: Accomplice

I still had no particular agenda for Glasgow, but I had some help in picking a direction from my new buddy Nasir. Nasir is a Pakistani student living in Glasgow that I met on my bus ride from Manchester a week ago. He told me to look him up when I got to Glasgow, so that's what I did. We met up downtown by the bus station, and after a short discussion decided to head through downtown and go to the Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery. It's the second most visited museum in the UK, and its surrounded by some nice parks. Despite living in Glasgow, Nasir had never been there either, so to me it seemed like a pretty obvious choice. The weather was pretty overcast, but as we wandered our way to Kelvingrove it cleared up a lot.

(Nasir in front of Kelvingrove)

The gallery was pretty impressive, and as usual I was a big fan of many of the statues. Much of the museum section was similar to the other museums I've been too, but it did include a pretty amazing exhibit on warfare and combat that had the largest collection of swords, pikes, armor and other old weapons I've seen.

(Bust of William Wallace)

The museum was right across from the Glasgow University. As we were leaving I took this picture of the school, with the Glasgow bowling green in the foreground.

We then headed for lunch, which I offered to pay for as thanks for his showing me around - and which he then insisted he pay for as I was his guest in the city. Ultimately his insistence won out, but if he ever comes to visit Canada I owe him one.
He had to work in the afternoon, so we headed to the river and worked our way down it towards his place. The riverside had some particularily interesting architecture and bridges.

(The Glasgow Conference Center on the right, Scotland BBC on the left)

On the other side he headed home and I started walking back up along the opposite side of the river, stopping on my way home to pick up a cheap alarm clock I'll be needing in the coming days.