A Little Exploration

Today I took a rather long walk to the post office.  The Royal Mail people have an irritating habit of not leaving packages at the door if you're out and they don't fit through the mail slot.  Maybe people were stealing them, who knows.  But the point is, if you miss them, you have to go to the post office and pick it up.  That's all fine and good when you know where the post office is, but there are several, and packages don't always seem to go to the same one, for whatever reason.  Since starting school inevitably involves ordering things (scrubs, lab coats, etc), I have had a few packages already since I got here.

Of course, when I got the slip yesterday, it told me I had to go to a different post office than the one my flatmate took me to before, so I used my pocket map of Glasgow to find my way there.  I made it fairly uneventfully to the post office (meaning that I only walked about half a mile past it before I realized that the street name had changed... there wasn't a big sign saying "Post Office," which for some reason I was expecting... just a tiny red window with a very small "Royal Mail" logo), got my package, and didn't get lost at all on the way home.  Anyway, it was a nice walk because it took me through some residential streets with a bit more character than mine (we live in new-ish buildings that all look more or less the same, and right behind us is the subsidized housing that actually is all the same).  People have little front gardens, and some of the streets were cobbled, and the row houses all had steep little roofs.  Pretty.

I took another walk in the other direction this afternoon, towards the Garscube Estate, where the vet school is.

 This is the little canal you cross over to get from my house to the school.  There's a nice walking/biking path on the near side of it.

 Here it is again, a view in the other direction.  The school is about a five-eight minute walk from here.  I didn't get any pictures of it today, since there were lots of people walking dogs by the gate, and I was feeling shy, but I'll have some shortly.

 The internet tells me that this is a magpie.  The bird, not the car.  They're everywhere, and they make a ridiculous laughing sound that's very loud.  If you look closely at one, they have beautiful blue and green iridescent feathers over their wings.

This is a VW Golf Plus.  Just like the normal VW Golf, but bigger in all dimensions, and about the size of a station wagon.  In general, though, cars are much smaller here than in the States.  And my little VW Golf that I drive at home is a very popular car (even considered a bit fancy, ha!).  What I've been most amused by is that there are two common models of Ford here, both sub-compact and neither of which I have ever seen in the States.  They would look ridiculous next to one of the American Ford SUVs. 

This is the Ford KA, which you see everywhere.  It's about the size of a jelly bean, and looks pretty small next to a Mini Cooper.

Anyway, it would still hurt to be run over by, so I'm remembering to look right before I cross the street.