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The Melted Continent: Travels through Post-Soviet Europe
By Cassandra Yates

Originally Published on New American Horizons
Netsite/:US/bus/NewAmericanHorizon

Reprinted with the author’s permission by Bolt451




29th May Twenty Fourteen


My flight from Idlewild had been uneventful. My budget didn’t cover anything beyond Pan-Am’s premium standard class. This entailed a slight incline to my seat and the ability to move my legs without kicking the person in front. I probably wouldn’t have been able to sleep but luckily I hadn’t wanted to. We’d taken off from New York at half seven and it was roughly eight now, local time. I wasn’t looking forward to my inevitable jet lag but I had a few interesting bars earmarked if I so wanted a sleeping aid. I had forgone overpriced airline coffee and was feeling quite tired but it was hard to tell if this was caffeine withdrawal or not.


The plane tilted and I looked out the window and I noted we quite weren’t there yet. What I’d later discover was the mouth of the Clyde drifted lazily past the window as I figured we were in a holding pattern. I lost and found countless towns in amongst the patchy cloud. After a while I noticed the towns were merging together, forming the outer edges of North Britain’s largest city. After twenty minutes of circling we straightened out and began our approach into Glasgow Mountbatten Airport. Our plane lined up with the left of the two runways and we touched down just as it was starting to cloud over. I waited as various other passengers lined up to get off the plane first, despite the doors not opening. Once there was room stowed my computer into my hand luggage and made my way off the plane.


Glasgow Mountbatten’s Terminal One is a fantastic example of Cold War British Americaphile. Terminals Two is much more subdued in its seventies austere but One is a monument to Anglo-American Reconstruction. Construction began under the presidency of its namesake but was eventually opened by his successor (statues of the former in the spacious entrance hall and I’d encounter a statue of President Eden in the City Centre. Even the terminal piers to the planes look more like they should be connecting to a Titan Rocket instead of a Lockheed Jet with their metallic supports and stylised window frames. As I looked out the round-cornered windows of the pier I can see the terminal building itself. Its roof swoops outwards and upwards with metallic detailing like the tails of my grandpa’s huge land yacht. The framework of the windows is in this same shining silver and while I got the impression that it was probably horribly dated in the eyes of Glaswegians, North Brits and probably a lot of Americans too but I was rather fond of it. Every inch seems to scream in Thomas Dewey’s voice “America is here to be your ally!” and “Did we mention we’re building jets and rockets because we totally are!” (It turns out there’s a statue of President Dewey in the entrance hall too, go figure). It’s a style I’d come across a few other times in my travels, it seems it was quite popular amongst the more Atlanticist elements of the Conservative Governments of the fifties and sixties both during and after reconstruction


My fellow passengers were all waiting by the luggage conveyor and I took a moment to people watch. It was early evening on a Thursday and the flight seems to have favoured tourists over business types, the latter having taken an overnight or some similar redeye. A family to my left are clearly local, speaking loudly in what I’d soon discover is not only Scottish but Glaswegian too. The children wore matching Statue of Liberty T-shirts while their parents wore matching expressions of exhaustion. If I had to guess they’d just gotten over their jet lag in time to come back to British Summer Time. Our bags appeared and we silently filed out as animated signs welcomed us to The Republic of Great Britain. The British-North American trade agreement smiled on me and I was only given minimal crap at customs compared to if I’d been travelling from Europe. My fellow countrymen having given me the lion’s share of customs hassle back in New York. Luckily I’d avoided the full cavity search as they’d only asked about my aims while in the North. From all angles, tourist videos played a mix of natural scenes from the Scottish Highlands and the lake district mixed in with shots of castles, the Presidential residence and countless other sights from across the RGB. I don’t know if there were less adverts than the US or travelling around hand rendered me immune to their sights and sounds.


The entrance hall of Terminal One is the same streamlined chrome would-be moonbase style as the rest of the building with only the shopfronts to tell me its two thousand and fourteen. Even the signs, long since updated, have been made with a nod to the building’s post-war nuclear Americana. I pulled my bag across the entrance hall towards the escalators down to the terminal’s metro station. I considered getting a taxi or a bus but the gathering clouds outside looked ominous. I briefly checked where


Pulling my suitcase behind me I made my way towards the Airport train station. The travelator that took me there was lined with screens that showed adverts that travelled along with you.. In amongst familiar brands like Coke and Ford I saw adverts for Barr’s Soda and Tunnock’s Chocolates just to remind myself I wasn’t at Idlewild or McKeithen. I checked the map and made sure I was on the right like but as it turned out I was at the terminus station that served only one line. The train was uneventful and familiar to anyone who has been Every city’s train system has a different smell and none of them nice. Glasgow didn’t disappoint.


I got off at Glasgow South, the main terminus station that had trains heading south to Carlisle, Liverpool, York and, I noted, south of the border to Birmingham. This last service went from its own separate, cordoned off platform. Central Glasgow felt like central San Francisco, but the grid lines slid down to the Clyde instead of the Bay. On my flight over hear I read that this layout existed more or less before the war but after the cities almost total destruction at the hands of the Luftwaffe, the Heer and then somewhat unfortunately, the Anglo-American Reconquista, this grid was expanded further. My hotel was of a similar style to the airport, as it turned out but more Art Deco than Reconstruction Americana. Unfortunately beyond the entrance hall it could’ve been just another Best Western or Apollo anywhere in America. The staff were welcoming and cheerful and lead me up to my room, where I’m now sat as I type this. My desire to sleep at a reasonable time has lost out to my caffeine withdrawal headache and my expectations of Jetlag.



29th May, continued.

(the following was written the following morning and is brought to you by the molecule, caffeine)

Glasgow is fairly well known for its Queer scene. The vagaries of a handful of arrests lead to a reaction that formed a Queer scene bigger than Manchester or even the Capital. On my travels across America I’ve attended my fair mix of Queer Celebration Marches and gotten drunk in a mix of Queer friendly bars, (mostly in Greenwich, NY) so I owed it to myself to go for at least one at the Famous Beau Brummell pub. The building now labelled the Brummel Rebuilt twice, once after the war and once after it was burned down in 1986 its has been restored to its old Victorian façade, lavishly painted in deep reds. As it happened this was a mistake as every Queer tourist and probably a fair few heteros too all had the same idea. Still it was nice to have visited the focal point of the British Queer Protests of the eighties and nineties (although an argument can be made for both Manchester and the capital, of course). The bar’s front, in fact the whole street was the scene of various iconic photos of Drag Queens facing down riot police and lesbians in buzzcuts performing first aid on dudes in crop tops. Walking on these famous streets that’d been painted with water cannons, blood and glitter I now knew how tourists felt around Greenwich in places I took for granted.


After assessing the four deep queue for the bar I decided to hop back to the other side of South station to Lily’s, a less famous but still suitably friendly Queer bar with enough women in militaria couture and sharp formal wear for my liking. While there I read that Lily’s also played a part in the Glasgow Protest scene, albeit under a different name, a reasonably friendly pub chosen almost at random by Glasgow’s Sapphic community and then stuck with their patronage since. I caught the pub’s kitchen just before it closed and they forgave my jet lagged sensibilities. I ordered food and While I could’ve gotten a bourbon and coke I like to make an effort to try local booze. In this case it was ale, something fairly corporate discussed as a small family business based in Newcastle. Based on my experiences with American beers I was sceptical. Very quickly however I fell in love with it I drank my first pint before my food had arrived and soon enough I was fairly a welcome sleepy. I polished off my piece of steak pie and another pint of ale before shuffling back to my hotel as jetlag caught up with me.
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