A Boon for Armchair Travelers

Admittedly, Google is usually viewed as an Evil Overlord by techies. Their multiple and egregious stances on privacy policy — they’re against much, and tend to sell user information to marketers — their attempts at shoving everyone into using Google+ — because we’re logged on to the Search Engine so much, we’ve gotten used to them — their role in quietly and thoroughly suppressing Blogger-based blogs in various countries — in accordance with those country’s laws, yes, but it’s amazing how they are very lawful about China, whereas Japan and Germany don’t want their neighborhoods photographed for the maps, and yet …they’re photographed. Hmmm. — their buying up of every small tech company in sight — these and legion other issues cause most of the tech-savvy to cock a wary eye in Google’s direction, as we do. HOWEVER, periodically, Google does something awesome. No, not just the Google Doodles which are so unnecessarily wonderful. No! This is something even better! They’ve given University alumni The Cloisters, and the rest of the University of Glasgow — forever.

People see the Google Maps cars going by, and know that their particular stretch of territory is being photographed to join the massive world map that Google has created — but previously, they only mapped places by car. Now, they’ve taken to hauling out the cameras and heading for walkways and ducking into public corridors. Thus, a labeled map, with details of University buildings and contact information is now available, as is an eye-level view of the West Quad, which houses the University Chapel, where many a lovely musical evening has been spent, as well as The Cloisters, our very favorite spot on the whole of the campus, other than the bell tower (and we defy a Google camera person to go up all hundred and forty plus narrow stairs toting camera equipment — it looks like they do the photography on a bike. Periodically you see a glimpse of a helmet in the bottom of the picture. And then it vanishes. Spooky!). You can see just about everywhere we’ve walked around, where D’s taken classes, and the whole, beautiful, historical campus. It’s a lovely, sunny — rare, rare, rare — day when they photographed it as well.

Google is still the Evil Overlord – seriously. We’ll never take that for granted. But they take pretty pictures.