Glasgow and Beyond!

WOW I've been a wee bit busy, as they say in Glasgow! But it's about time to update this baby and get on with things!

I got into Glasgow at about 1 yesterday afternoon after a really long train ride (first one, by the way!) and checked into my awesome hostel 5 minutes away from the train station, and was helped by a very cute Scottish reception boy! Haha, just a bit of fun but anyways the hostel is unreal; I'm on the 8th floor so I have a great view, awesome bar in the lobby, really good breakfast (for a change!), good, clean kitchen, nice rooms, I could go on! It's the EuroHostel, if anybody wants to stay here I highly recommend it!

Anyways I quickly got changed and headed out to find Mono, an all-vegan cafe I've been dying to get to, and I hadn't eaten since 6 am so I was starved! I found the place easily and it was unbelievable! Super cute, suprisingly big and inexpensive, and a huge, all-vegan menu! It took me forever to decide because I actually had choices! I could choose off the WHOLE menu and that NEVER happens! I'm lucky if I have 2 choices! As a vegan, you eat whatever you can, and I'm never unhappy about that because I'm not a picky eater, but to have a full menu to choose off of was something else! All you vegans out there should be very jealous! Anyways, I got the staple: huge bean burger with lettuce, tomato, caramalized onion, mushroom, and melted vegan cheese with a salad and fries. It was unreal, like UNREAL lol. Serously, check out there menu here:
http://www.monocafebar.com/food.php
very cool for me! I talked to the girls working there for a bit and it was so cool, definitely made me want to open one at home! THEN I saw a sign advertising that they needed a supervisor and I actually thought about it! How awesome would it be to live in Glasgow and manage an all-vegan cafe? Super awesome!! Still thinking about it! Will go back for another before I leave, for sure. THEN no sooner I walk across the street and right into a vegetarian pub! The 13th note is a mostly vegan bar serving pub food and vegan cocktails, with vegetarian options as well. I took a look at their menu and noticed that they had vegan ice cream! So of course I got some and chatted to the bartender. They have live gigs there every weekend and a few weekends ago they had a band playing until really late, and the band members went out to McDonalds and bought bangers (pretty sure that's what she said she had a really thick accent!) for all the fans in the room, and the staff actually made the band members take the food outside and eat it. HOW cool and bitchy is that?! Haha I loved it!

Aftert that I just walked around and checked out the sights, shopping, etc. Also walked by the River clyde and got a couple of photos.

Yesterday night my roomate, Maria from Argentina, and I got all dressed up and went downstairs to Osmosis, the bar attatched to the hostel. We met a couple of guys, a group of guys from Ireland with incredibly thick accents, and a solo guy, Sean, from Aussie. We were all getting kind of hungry so we set out for some food and found a japanese/indian place that had AWESOME veggie sushi, like baby corn rolls and veggie rolls with smoked tofu, mushrooms, avocado, etc. Yummy! This blog seems like it's all about food lol but to be fair I've hardly eaten out this whole trip, so I've been eating like a queen in Glasgow! Anyways after dinner (at 10 pm, everyone eats super late here) we found a bar called Common, serving 1 pound drinks that we just couldn't resist! And they were actually drinks like full bottles of anything (Bulmers, Bacardi Breezers, Stella, anything! Double highballs were 2 pounds!) We actually met up with Sean's roomates there Jordan and Jameer, both from California, totally by accident, and had fun drinking and dancing and admiring all the Europeans' dress and style. We also watched Jordon's crazy dance moves that unfortunately left the ladies running AWAY from him... haha. The 1 pound drinks made it easy for everyone to buy rounds; a round for 5 people was the cost of 1 drink anywhere else! So Maria and I had a couple of drinks then walked back to the hostel around midnight.

This morning I was up bright and early for my full day tour to the Highlands, Loch Ness, Inverness, and various other cities on the way up. The tour was a little pricey, and I knew I would be spending most of my time on the coach, but I had to do it just to go up and see more of Northern Scotland. We drove up, stopping a couple of times for tea and pictures. We had a stop at the Three Sister Mountains in the highlands and there was a random bagpiper (really bad too lol) who's probably there everyday. Even though he was horrible, it made for some cool pictures, but hard to get just him in the picture as all the tourists were rishung towards him to get pictures. Very cool though!

We drove through a bunch of little towns, and the tour guide was a really nice, funny, very scottish old man. He knew every little detail about every town, so that was good. We finally made it up to Loch Ness, with a stop to look at the remains of the Urquehart Castle, which was blown up when the family evacuated it way back when, so that no one else could live in it. That's one way of making sure nobody wrecks your house.. blow it up?!

We took a little hour long cruise of Loch Ness and searched for Nessie with no such luck (boooo). Met 3 flight attendant from Dallas, Texas, who REALLY wanted to see her! They were cool girls though, and definitely made me want to be a flight attendant one day! They actually do charter flights, and they flew over a whole bunch of the golfers for the British Open, and they wait in Scotland until it's over then they take the golfers up to Canada for another tour, then they go home. So cool! They've been everywhere! Anyways, the boat cruise was nice, and then we were on the road again. We covered over 600 km's in one day, so it was a lot of driving, but beautiful scenery, and probably a once in a lifetime thing! The cafe that we stopped at for lunch had veggie french onion soup too, so I was a happy camper!

Got back into Glasgow just before 8 and organized my trip to southern Loch Lamond tomorrow for the highland games! The girls at the tourist center were amazingly helpful, and saved me from going 2 hours further to a different games, so that was good! Very excited for tomorrow; probably gonna take it easy tonight; even though the bar literally right next to me is hopping, I might just go to bed! Happy birthday Dad (yesterday), I sent him a postcard 10 days early from Dublin and it got to him right on time! Hope everyone's well at home, and that you're having better July weather than I am! It rains a lot here as well, but I'm loving it