Day Five: The Dude Abides

After Auchentoshan, we settled in at our Glasgow hotel, which was in a cool old fashioned building where you had to open a gate to use the elevator. This charmed me entirely, and I was glad that E didn't hesitate at using the elevator, even though we were only going up one floor. Had he resisted, I would have been forced to insist, because that's how fascinated I was by this gate closing elevator procedure.

For dinner in Glasgow, we planned to travel to the Brewdog (http://www.brewdog.com/bars/glasgow). E had done research on this place before we came and I was certainly eager enough to go a craft brew sort of pub. It would be a nice change of place from the Islay bars, which offered usually no more than four varieties of beer and no fewer than forty types of whisky. It seemed like it was too far to walk, so we took a cab there and promptly realized that it was actually a reasonable distance from our hotel.

And here I went to law school, like a sucker.

The Brewdog is a very cool sort of place and we got something almost like an American burger there. I wish they had them in the States (and maybe someday they will). The tables were littered with board games, including everything from Monopoly to Trivial Pursuit to "Party Block Stacking Game", which is apparently the UK's much more descriptive name for what we call "Jenga".

Although the torrential sea had kept us from visiting Arran, we were able to try, at Brewdog, a beer brewed in the Arran distillery's casks. The beer itself was dark, sweet and bitter simultaneously. It was almost black in color, and thick, but quite good. E and I split a bottle, which was for the best, as I couldn't see myself finishing wanting any more of it than I had (which is not to say I didn't enjoy it, just that it's the sort of beer that goes over better in a smaller quantity).

After dinner, we decided to walk back to the hotel. This was a good decision, since we were able to stop in several pubs along the way. Of course, after our recent adventures, we had to stop in the Islay Bar (which offered less of a whisky selection than even the tiniest bar we had seen on Islay itself) and have a drink. The atmosphere inside was comfortingly pub like - quite casual and all dark woods and dim lighting. We went into a few more similar pubs, in a quest to experience as much of Glasgow as we could in one evening, and ended up stopping in a little place called Lebowskis (http://www.lebowskis.co.uk/lebowskis-glasgow.php). Even though neither E nor myself adores a White Russian, we were intrigued by the bar's theme, to which they adhered admirably. I gamely ordered a rather standard White Russian and realized that, while tasty, I prefer my alcohol to taste like alcohol and my chocolate milk to taste like chocolate milk. 

All in all, our impromptu pub crawl was highly entertaining. We made sure to get plenty of rest that evening, as we had a major event to attend in the morning: The World Piping Championships 2013 awaited us in all their glory and splendor.