Displaced

Day 1 – Glasgow

Today was a good start to the vacation. For the first time in 14 years, courtesy of my boyfriend’s new membership in some kind of elite flying club-type-entity, we were bumped up to Business Class. Since there is no First Class, as far as I can tell, unless there is some sort of throne strapped to the nose of the plane which is invisible to the eye of a lowly coach-er, let’s just go ahead and call it First Class. We got our own DVD players and about 9 courses of food, which they didn’t finish serving until about 6AM destination time. Unfortunately, all the rich food made me ill, but what better location to be ill in? I also watched a whole movie and used all the available recliner buttons several times each. This meant I got about an hour of sleep in the recliner chair, but who’s counting? At least I took full advantage of the amenities. It’s an interesting thing about luxury that increasingly it is associated with not doing anything. This runs counter to all of my habits but, presumably, I could learn.

Second arrival stroke of luck: the hotel room was ready and we did not have to power through that unpleasant first day in Europe where you leave your bags in the lobby until check-in at 3PM. So we slept and showered and had a nice evening hunting the deserted streets for dinner and drinks. I had a kilo of mussels. For your reference, this is too many mussels.

We are here for a biotech conference. This sucks for the boyfriend, to some degree, as he has to get up early. It does not suck for him entirely though, as the conference is a good one. It certainly does not suck for me, as I have a week to tweedle around southern Scotland with my laptop and decide what I want to do next.