Friday 11 September 2009

Thursday 10th September 2009 - An Old-Time Good Time

          I ran down to Glasgow to look over the hotels google pointed me at.  They simply didn't exist.  There was one address where a hotel could simply never have existed.  I asked at city hall, and the lady said there was a hotel at Natural Bridge, which is a tourist spot about five miles away.  I drove over.  The hotel would not have looked out of place on the sea front at Brighton.  I didn't bother to ask about their rates.
          So  it looks like I will have to stay in Bueno Vista and motor down to Glasgow.  That won't help "hanging out" with any Glasgow folk.  But I will have to arrange to meet the mayor, hand over the letter and banner.  It looks like there is a mayoral election going on, although I only saw signs up for one candidate.  I will have to be careful not to appear to give my approval to one candidate.  People might be heavily swayed by the opinions of an ambassador from the original Glasgow.
 
          One of the pubs in Bueno Vista is called the "Stone Grey Pub".  It is a reference to the Confederate view of the defeat at Gettysburg, but Google only provided three references to it, and those were CDs of country songs.  The pub was certainly full of confederate memorabilia.
 
          Later that night, there were lots of jam sessions going on.  One, in particular, was not old-time music, more 'good-time' music.  It was just as old, but it was from black roots, rather than Scots-Irish.  I got into trouble for saying "negro" music, which I thought a bit unfair, since when this music was first being created, it would have been described by the other, now totally unusable 'N' word.  The lead musician was white, from Chapell Hill, near Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina.  He was so good, I just had to ask him, in my cups, why he wasn't famous.

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