This is kind of a big deal for me, because much as I love Apple, I have resisted the mighty touchscreen gadget for a good long time. For a multitude of reasons, I don’t want now, nor have I ever wanted, an iPhone. I’m not a phone person for one thing. I barely make calls, and I only send enough texts to spend about £10 every 2 months. And they’re WAY too expensive to be carrying around all carefree. I’m sorry, but if I paid £400 for an iPhone and something – loss, theft, damage, whatever – happened to it, I would be horrified. I just can’t afford to take that kind of financial hit when I’ve got  at least 15 more years of student loan payments looming over me. So the best way to avoid that is just not getting one.

So, no iPhone. But I’ve also shunned the iPod touch for the same major reason I’ve discounted the iPhone as an option: I do not wish to be tied to the interwebs by a device. Everyone I know with an iPhone, Scott included, spends SO much more time than they would usually spend fiddling with the internet and social media. And I feel like I get enough of that between my computer and my job, so I really wanted to avoid that kind of overuse, and in some cases overdependence, on technology just because it’s there.

However, despite all of that, the time had come for me to replace my 5 year old 30GB iPod. (It still works, but the battery is shot, so it’s basically going to live out the rest of its life as a plugged in, very small box for the large portion of my CD collection which resides in my parents’ house across the ocean.) The 2GB of space on my dinky, but well-loved, Nokia just wasn’t cutting it, and it was fiddly to manage anyway.

I deliberated for longer than is probably healthy on whether I should go for the nano or the touch. And if the nano had still been the style it was before they made it a little square touchscreen, I might have ended up with that. But I did realise that the touch could be a pretty useful tool, especially for things like travel. And lately, I’ve come to realise that I’m probably going to be in the line of work I’m in for a good long time (which isn’t a bad thing, by the way), and keeping up on the current technology is a good idea for my personal education in the field. So in the end, I decided the iPod touch was the best choice, both as a device and in terms of value for money.

Now that I have it, I DO like it. I’ve set myself some personal rules, like no facebook unless I’m travelling (and even then, I’d rather avoid it, because it gets more evil by the hour). And avoiding using the interweb in bed. But also positive rules like getting into podcasts again. And even Twitter. Not to tweet myself, but to keep up with news and cool things like science that I don’t normally seek out unless I’m thinking about it. I freaking LOVE science. Especially space. And I haven’t really given myself the time to explore that as much as I’d like to. Now I have free apps for NASA and Space Weather, and the amazing StarWalk app so I know what I’m looking at in the night sky no matter where I am.

Today I listened to Neil deGrasse Tyson’s StarTalk podcast on the way to and from work, and it was absolutely awesome AND hilarious. I mean, did you know what lobsters and Spock have in common? Because I do now. But I found out the show just by following him on Twitter the other day. I also followed Jon Snow (for you Americans, he’s Channel 4′s badass news anchor) who is now in Japan tweeting the aftermath as he sees it, and actually providing some decent insight rather than just gaping at it all. Things like that are actually getting me really excited about being more informed and learning about stuff I’m interested in during my 45 minute walks every morning and afternoon. So if I can use this gadget to facilitate that, it was definitely worth the money.

And, most importantly, now I can play Angry Birds.

So, Saturday, we got up and went for a full Scottish breakfast. According to something I’d just seen on TV, this put us way over our recommended salt intake for the day. But man! Was it tasty. Bacon, egg, sausage, haggis, black pudding, mushrooms, and a tattie scone. I don’t do that baked beans thing they love so much in this country. We don’t go for the full breakfast very often. In fact, usually we don’t eat breakfast like that unless we’re on vacation. So it wasn’t exactly a guilt-laden meal.

Fully satisfied, we got on a train to Glasgow. Once we arrived, I decided the easiest way to get to the Science Centre was by subway. Seeing as how this was only my third ever trip to Glasgow, I could have been wrong, but it was easy enough save for the fact that I wouldn’t want to walk through the area between the station and the Centre in the dark.

The Glasgow subway system is the third oldest subway in the world, and it’s tiny. The trains have 3 carriages and they’re just about tall enough for me to stand in the very centre. It seems like you’re on more of a model than a real subway train, but then it doesn’t need to be very big anyway, as Glasgow is not the metropolis that London or New York is.

The system is just one line that runs in a loop (it’s nicknamed The Clockwork Orange). I suppose the advantage of this, from a tourist’s point of view anyway, is that it doesn’t make a lot of difference if you get on the wrong loop, because you’ll just come back around to the right place eventually. And a full circle only takes about 24 minutes, so you really can’t go wrong. It only took about 8 minutes to get to our stop.

As a lover of Bill Nye the Science Guy and all such make-science-fun things, science centres always initially excite me. I say ‘initially’ because there are a lot of science centres that cater almost exclusively to kids, which pisses me off, especially when I’ve spent the money to go in without any indication of this from the staff. I want to be able to play with just as many of the cool science toys that the kids can without people looking at me like I’m stealing their youngster’s chance at a happy day. I don’t want to get that feeling that other people are thinking ‘whyyyyy is she here?’ because fuck that! Science is for everyone, not just little Timmy, drooling on the buttons that control the giant magnet.

Luckily, I was pleasantly surprised. The Glasgow Science Centre caters for all. And while the place WAS crawling with some kind of scout group, they weren’t so numerous that you couldn’t get at any of the exhibits without tripping over someone under 12. In fact, we never really had to wait to do anything. And there was SO MUCH to do.

They had the usual stuff about how light and electricity works and how the human body is put together, but they also had a lot of things I’d never seen before. There was a music maker thing that worked using beams of light and an LED harp, there were a few games that tested your reaction time, there was a giant Soma cube to put together, there was a bunch of stuff on cloning and stem cell research (Scotland will not soon forget that they produced Dolly the sheep). There was even a thing where you put together a news report about stem cells, which was basically for kids, but it was teaching them that the news is supposed to be impartial to either view on the subject being reported so that people get the facts, which I think is a valuable lesson. I played a computer game that simulated how hard it is to save everyone who needs an organ from the donor list. And there was a whole special exhibit on DNA and the human genome where I got to compare myself to a duckbilled platypus. Apparently we’re not very similar.

When we had our fill of science (and our stomachs were starting to rumble) we ventured back into the city centre and went to Wagamama for an early dinner. When we ordered, I told the waitress that I was allergic to shellfish (because you’re supposed to tell them so they know). Regardless of this, when our Duck Gyoza came, it was actually Prawn Gyoza. I knew this because I took a bite and thought ‘this is not duck’. They apologised and switched it and I, being preemptively cautious, took a benadryl. I wasn’t going to have one piece of shrimp ruin my Wagamama! And to be fair, the Duck Gyoza looks exactly like the Prawn one on the outside. Next time I’ll get Scott to taste my food.

Crisis averted (I got a tingle of an itch, but I think the benadryl shot any other reactions down), we sipped our Asahi Premium Black Lager and ate our duck dumplings. Then the noodles arrived and the slurping commenced. Scott had Chicken Itame, which is a spicy coconut thing with rice noodles, and I had Salmon Ramen, in which there was an enormous piece of salmon involved.  Scott had never been to Wagamama before, so I was happy to hear that his dinner was the best chicken noodle soup he’d had in forever. I wish they would open a restaurant in Edinburgh because I would be in there all the time. Takeout noodles for lunch? I think so.

We don’t know much about Glasgow and the stores were about to close anyway, so we decided to head back to Edinburgh early where we ended up drinking wine, eating chocolate cheesecake, and watching some of my Long Way Round DVDs (further increasing my undying urge to get our asses to Russia and Mongolia). The perfect anniversary? I think so.