Central Belt
Started: 2024-08-21 19:42:28
Submitted: 2024-08-21 21:55:31
Visibility: World-readable
Landing in Edinburgh and traveling across Scotland's Central Belt to Glasgow for Worldcon
I probably managed to get about four hours of sleep on my flight across the Atlantic Ocean from IAD to Edinburgh, sitting in a window seat near the back of a United 757-200. (This was not actually the longest single flight I've taken in a narrow-body aircraft; that distinction goes to my flights between Seattle and Keflavík to attend Worldcon in 2019.) The cabin crew began bustling about to serve us breakfast in advance of landing. We began our descent, though layers of clouds above the ground, and presently I saw the Scottish countryside out the window, laid out in irregularly-shaped fields surrounding urbanized areas. (This looks like the outskirts of Stirling, with the motorway junction between the M9 and M80 visible at the bottom of the picture.)
We landed in Edinburgh and shuffled off the plane to head to immigration. I followed the signs directing US passport holders to the automatic immigration gates. The first time I tried to use the automatic gates at Heathrow five years ago, it rejected me for reasons that were never explained, but possibly involved the camera being unable to recognize me while I was wearing my glasses. This time I took my glasses off and the machine whirred to itself as it adjusted itself to the right height, then decided I must be the right person for the passport I was carrying and opened the gate to let me into the country.
While waiting for my suitcase at baggage claim, I joined the airport wifi and caught up on social media. It was noon local time, and I tried to avoid doing the time zone conversion (subtracting eight hours) to figure out how early it would be in my home time zone. At some length my bag arrived, and I walked out through customs (via the "nothing to declare" lane) into the international arrivals corner of the airport.
My next mission was to buy a local SIM card, which involved finding a convenience store that was supposed to be inside the airport terminal. This involved walking most of the way back across the airport, past the domestic baggage claims and airline check-in counters before I found a WH Smith with a display of SIM cards at the back of the store. I picked one sort of at random (on the "Three" network, which I've used on prior trips to the UK) and paid £30 for a temporary SIM card.
I caught a tram from the airport to central Edinburgh and took the time to swap my new SIM card into my phone. (The last time I visited Edinburgh, ten years ago, the trams were running in trials but had not yet opened for passengers, so I was excited that I finally got to ride the tram.) I got off the tram on Princes Street, with a prime view of Edinburgh Castle looming on the hill above the city, and ate lunch at Black Sheep Coffee.
I walked down Princes Street to Edinburgh Waverley station. I bought a one-way train ticket to Glasgow, then checked the monitors to see that the next train (the 13:45 service) was departing in three minutes. I found the train in time, stowed my suitcases on the luggage rack, and found my seat for the 51-minute ride across the Central Belt to Glasgow-Queen Street station. (I traveled with my larger checked bag, plus a smaller carry-on-sized rolling suitcase, mostly because my suitcase weighed 42 pounds before I bought anything on my trip, and I would probably find more than 8 pounds of books and other things to buy.)
I checked the GPS app on my phone as my electrified train traveled at 100 mph on smooth train tracks, barely rocking as the countryside sped by outside the windows of the train. This is a place that is willing to spend money on rail infrastructure, and I was immediately jealous.
The sky was still overcast as I stepped onto the street in front of Glasgow-Queen Street station, and it began to rain as I walked across Glasgow to the central station. I missed my turn to the station and ended up looping around the long way, following Argyle Street under the bridge supporting the train platforms, and up the street on the opposite side. I checked into my hotel, the Grand Central Hotel, originally built when the train station was built at the end of the nineteenth century. My room, on the fifth floor, overlooked the canopy over the train platforms, and if I listened carefully I could just barely hear the automated announcements below, which was oddly comforting.
I took a shower and headed out to the Scottish Event Campus, a short ride west on the suburban Argyle Line, accessed via a lower-level station running perpendicular to the south-facing terminal platforms of the main station. The rain had picked up, and I was glad that my hotel connected directly to the station concourse so I didn't have to go out into the rain. At the Exhibition Centre station I only had a brief excursion into the rain to enter a covered walkway leading along the length of the station and across the A expressway to deposit me right in front of the main entrance to the exhibition center.
I found the convention registration desk, which had a very short line. I picked up my convention badge and booklet, then wandered into the exhibition halls to orient myself and start to figure out where everything was. The exhibits and fan tables were in Hall 4, along with a long line of food trucks serving a variety of fried foods. The dealers tables were in Hall 5, which closed at 18:00 every day. I got a snack and sat down with the program to figure out what I could see (I had missed the opening ceremony), and I decided I was just in time to see the panel "Fight the Power: Systems as Villains in SFF" at 17:30.
I found the Lomond Auditorium, with plenty of time to spare before the start of the panel, and ran into my former colleague Macey. The panel was an interesting discussion about systems of evil and the people who work in and with (and against) the system, and how they make effective villains and foils and anti-heroes in narrative fiction.
The next panel that looked interesting was "Fungi in Speculative Fiction", which was in a room I couldn't find on the maps of the SEC in the program guide, so I figured it must be in the adjacent Crowne Plaza Hotel. This turned out to be connected to the SEC via a windowless elevated hallway that twisted and turned and seemed like it looped back on itself in a non-Euclidean manner. (The arrangement of the walkway made a lot more sense once I got a good look at it from ground level outside and I could see how it was suspended between three different buildings like an afterthought.) I made it as far as the hallway that indicated that it had the meeting room I was looking for; but because T. Kingfisher was on the panel and it was talking about fungi the room was already full, so I turned back to the SEC in search of a different panel.
The next thing that looked interesting in the same time slot was the panel "Content Warnings and Horror Casts", moderated by Alasdair Stuart (host of Pseudopod and publisher of Escape Artists). Most of the panelists knew each other already, and had worked with each other on content warnings in horror audio fiction, and the panel might have turned into an echo chamber but for the presence of Hildur Knútsdóttir, an Icelandic author of horror fiction who had an entirely different perspective. This gave the whole panel more to talk about, to defend and interrogate and explain their own perspectives about the trade-offs between content warnings and spoilers, and whether audio is a special media because people listen to it with earbuds so it's injected straight into one's head. At one point Hildur asked, "Do you content warn for climate change?" and the whole room gasped, in a good way.
By this point it was 20:00 local time, and there was more programming scheduled into the night. Instead I ate supper from a food truck in Hall 4, then reviewed my schedule for the next day. The program guide let me check off everything that looked interesting, so I ended up with multiple things in each time slot, with the vague idea that I could decide what I really wanted to see in the moment.
I headed back to the Exhibition Centre station but when I arrived I learned that the next train wouldn't arrive for an hour, so it was faster to walk the mile-and-a-half back to Glasgow Central. With the aid of Google Maps on my phone this turned out well enough. I returned to my hotel room in time to go to bed at 22:00 local time, which I hoped would give me a good shot at getting enough sleep before I wanted to wake up in the morning, while I steadfastly refused to do the time zone conversion to my home time zone, eight hours behind.
