City Living: The Joy of Not Having a Car

I was hopeful but uncertain about how much I would like being car-less in our new city.  I wondered how we would manage family life without a trunk full of sports equipment, crates of water bottles, on-demand pretzels and snacks, mobile phone chargers, Kleenex that doesn’t run out and a healthy supply of bags (the dry cleaning bag, the returns bag, the donations bag, the dirty shoes bag, the "left by another kid at your house" bag, the barf bag.)   I imagined a life without IKEA or worse, going to IKEA and only coming away with tea lights due to space constraints. 

I was excited about shopping with my cute trolley until I pictured walking home with a one-wheel-gone-missing trolley and a 24 pack of toilet paper balanced on my head.  (I know from recent experience that a one-wheel-gone-missing trolley is really just a very heavy, very awkward bag.)  Then I reminded myself I was returning to the land of Amazon and online grocery stores to take care of the relentless toilet paper needs even if it couldn’t solve for how to carry a large houseplant home.  (Answer: cute trolley gets dirty.  I cut off circulation to my right arm.)

Many of my concerns were about convenience and moving “freight” but I also wondered if I would miss the sanctuary of the car.  I wondered what it would be like on a rainy day after school and not having the comfort of a warm car to usher your kids into.  I wondered if the free-flowing conversation that sometimes happens between parent and child in the safety of a car would still happen on a noisy bus.  I wondered if I would get as much out of a podcast played in my ears instead of over the car speakers. 

But as it turns out, after six weeks of living in London, hope has beat out uncertainty.  Big time.  I do not love being wet and cold and packed in like a sardine on a crowded subway but I actually love not having car.  It’s definitely not always easy (ie, taking your feverish son to the doctor) but I’m confident that being on foot and on public transportation has been a major contributor in accelerating our sense of belonging to our new city.  I say the belonging bit with confidence for a number of reasons:

First, there is plenty of online shopping to solve the moving stuff around issue.  So many places deliver in London.   Having well-stocked backpacks and children old enough to pack them is another adjustment. We simply take more care when walking out the door knowing that we won't be returning for a long time.  And if there is something we would have had in our trunk but forgot to bring, we pick it up along the way.  (Shoes excluded.)  Our stuff now feels like the responsibility of each of us not just the one behind the wheel of the car.

Second, not having a car takes you out of the driver’s seat.  Ceding control, where you can, is healthy for all of us.  You are at the mercy of a bus driver or train operator and try as you might, you won’t be invited to ride shotgun.   Nor can you “make up” time by leaving a few minutes later.   You have to leave with plenty of time to get where you’re going (in London anything that crosses town usually means 45 minutes) and then surrender the rest of the ride to someone else behind the wheel or the upper limit of non-perspiring, speed walking.   Plus, until you exorcise it from your life, you have no idea how much traffic, terrible drivers and the teeny tiny number of available parking spaces causing 40% of the traffic intrudes on your sense of well-being. 

Third, not having a car means regular exercise just got a whole lot easier.  It also means that when confronted with an able-bodied but tired child, you can say “this is our only option” and they will know negotiation is futile.   So yeah, sometimes you have to dodge a few piles of dog poop on the sidewalk or suffer through a hail storm in the wrong outerwear, but you are burning calories while at it.  And when you’re (and they’re) burning calories instead of eating empty ones like stale car pretzels, the endorphins send you “well done” messages that make you like your life way more than you liked your leather seats.   

Fourth, after a few goes in the car, you know the way.  But when walking or taking public transportation, there’s always something more to experience because all your senses are engaged.  You are not just getting from point A to point B but you are creating a detailed mental map.  You see tucked away shops you wouldn’t notice from a car window.   You smell the coffee shops that roast their own beans.  You hear a wide range of voices, sometimes exuberant off-key singing, instead of the monotony of road traffic noise.  Your body begins to know where the wind tunnels are and where to expect a late afternoon sun beam.  My children might also mention not having a car improves the odds of stopping for a proper snack.  

All your interactions are closer and because you don’t have to keep your eyes fully on the road, you are free to notice them more.   Depending on the time of day (ie commuting hours), you might only be able to notice the dandruff on the guy sharing your personal space on the subway which isn’t awesome but still beats risking your left bumper and sanity trying to find parking where there is none.

And finally, if belonging is about community, mass transit can be a way to enter in to it.  Sometimes that means conversation (which I enjoy) but I’m finding that sitting or standing with someone in silence is a kind of solidarity.  I love not having mobile service when I go into the subway which forces me to engage with my thoughts or a book or the London Evening Standard.  It’s a wholly different kind of sanctuary than my car was, and I have to share it not just with my family, and yet it feels like one.   I doubt my children would agree on this point (they would say they prefer the car because there is more room) although they don’t seem at all hindered by sharing their day with witnesses.  Their sanctuary is wherever you are.

Not having a car isn’t viable in a lot of places but if you live in a big city, you might be surprised how much more at home you feel in your city without one.  So far it’s been one of our joys living in London. 

We are family

There are 20 minutes in each week I dread. From precisely 7:15pm to 7:25pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It’s the 10 minute walk my 13 year old son takes from basketball practice back to the Tube stop, far from home and in the dark.

Just now I pulled up the thesaurus and replaced “fear” with “dread” as if shedding fear, an emotion experienced whether a threat is real or imagined, is as simple as a search and replace. It takes more than that – often a communal effort – which, in this story, actually happened.

Now I came to these 20 minutes of weekly dread by choice. We want to honor our son’s desire to play competitive basketball which for him, in London, means a long transit. But we don’t have a car and it is not practical for my younger son and me to spend every Tuesday and Thursday from 4-8pm accompanying him to and from practice with a stop for falafel or fried chicken in between. I made the commute with my son until he felt comfortable doing it on his own. It didn’t take long for that to happen.

His basketball club is far outside the buzz of central London. It is not a destination stop. There are no tourist attractions. There aren’t even many street lights. If I’m being honest, the source of my fear wasn’t only because of my son’s age, the distance from home, the change of Tube lines, the dark and a general feeling that the area isn’t the safest. At a deeper level, I was scared because my child is white in a neighborhood that isn’t.

Did I just say that? I have no evidence, no experiences, and no hard data that should make me fearful. And it should be noted, my son is not afraid. And though it would be convenient, I can’t chalk it up to maternal instinct or unease because this is not my home country. No, that confession comes with a heavy dose of guilt. I know there is racism and stereotyping in my heart to even feel that way. I am ashamed to think that my 20 minutes of neatly scheduled discomfort is what a mother of color would feel EVERY time her child walked out the door, except hers would be grounded in a blanket of real – not imagined - experiences he and I will never have.

I would prefer to bury this confession except something happened to mitigate, though not completely erase, that dread. I didn’t “solve” the problem by hiring an Uber to take my son to and from practice which I could have done practically speaking but not without a cost to my son’s developing independence and him appearing even more entitled to his teammates than his latest Nike shoes already do. Something much more beautiful happened.

After the first practice where coach recognized I wasn’t there, he gathered the team around and told them to walk my son the 10 minutes back to the Tube stop. The entire team did it without question or complaint. (All of them except for my son live in the neighborhood.) I considered it a nice gesture of welcome to the team except that he’s asked a group of boys to do the same thing after every practice. When my son told his teammates recently it was ok he knew how to get to the Tube stop, they said: “No, we have to walk you. And if Coach finds out we didn’t, we’ll be running all practice.” Last practice Coach drove by to check on them, where every guy he asked to escort my son was there. Coach got out of the car to make sure my son understood: “Since you aren’t from around here, it’s better for your teammates to walk you. We are not just a team. We are a family.”

When I emailed Coach this weekend to thank him, he said it again, “You’re welcome. We are not just a team. We are family.”

You see I was kicking myself for seeing color but they saw it too. But where my instinct was to push down the reality of the color differences, their instinct was to face my son’s vulnerability as “other” and encircle him as you would any family member. I am humbled by how this team has embraced our son both on and off the court. It was so immediate and not because he is a star player. He is among talented players, many already towering over 6’3” at 13 years old. I know their model of familial love has instructional value beyond what I can grasp just yet.

It reminds me too what while I will never know when it means to move in the world where we are judged by our skin color, those brief flashes of discomfort we all experience from time to time – even the “managed” kind like my 20 minutes – can be openings for us to enter into a conversation we actively try to avoid. I found it interesting when I turned on my favorite podcast yesterday, “On Being” and the latest episode happened to be “Let’s Talk About Whiteness” by Eula Biss. I guess it was something I needed to hear. Maybe you, my white friend, do too.

Are you ready to eat? KERB Camden Market

One of the things we missed living in Luxembourg was the access to cheap eats.  I’m not talking fast food but good, inexpensive tasty food.  We hit the jackpot here in London as we live down the block from a street food market called KERB Camden Market which opened in August 2016.  It’s a 3 minute, 55 second walk from our front door.  (I timed it today.)  Open 7 days a week for lunch, there are 34 of London’s best street food vendors selling their signature dishes for mostly around £5.   Like who knew there was a thing called a Taiwanese Lunch Box or a Korean burrito? 

KERB has other pop up food markets around London but only the one in Camden is open every day.  We’ve sampled several of the vendors already (Venezuelan street food, halloumi fries, gourmet mac and cheese, salted caramel brownies) – without a single miss but a lot of napkins – but it will take weeks to eat our way through all of them.  So if you stop by over the lunch hour and I suggest you keep your coat on, you’ll know why.  And if I invite you round for dinner and serve you re-heated crispy squid, you have full permission to call me out.   

I have no tips except to say: a) go hungry and preferably without caloric judgment, b) go when you can’t decide what you want to eat or your kid has decided that the only thing he will eat is a hot dog because Oh My Dog!, c) go with a friend who likes to share and d) watch out for the pigeons.  It was quiet right at noon when it opened today (but there is also an overblown fear of “snow flurries” today) but typically the queues do pick up throughout the lunch hour.  The market stays open until 5pm Monday-Friday and until 6pm on Saturday and Sunday.  And if you overeat or the BBQ was good for your soul but not so much for your stomach, know you can get to a private toilet in 3 minutes, 55 seconds.  

This is (My) London

It’s been 19 days since we moved to London.   With something new and wonderful around every corner, I’ve been struggling with how to capture these first days and experiences in any opening post from our new home.  And so rather than attempting to compile the volumes of impressions (and food and restaurant heaven!) thus far, I’ll share two experiences that I hope have sway on the way we live out our next two years here. 

The first experience came this Thursday when I was in a coffee shop in Marylebone (Curators Coffee which I recommend by the way) after dropping the boys off for their first day of school.  There working was a barista who I recognized from ten days earlier in a totally different part of the city.  She was the first person in London, a city of over 8.5 million people, who I had seen twice.  Something in me swelled with that recognition – perhaps a feeling of connectedness in a city so big – that I went up to ask her if she had been where I thought she was ten days earlier (she had and only by chance) and then (awkwardly) told her she had been a kind of welcome gift to me in my new city.  She beamed and her co-workers ribbed her as I walked out the door:  “You’re famous in London!”

Our words can’t make someone famous but an unexpected reminder to someone that they have been noticed can make them feel that way.   There is so much to see in London but is there anything more lovely than connecting, however briefly, with another person?   I think not and so while I’ve been rather preoccupied with shopping and setting up a new house, I am overjoyed to be back on soil where English is the common language and opportunities for conversation – and potential for connection- will never run dry.   

The second experience came this Friday when I arrived 20 minutes early to pick up the boys from school which is on a beautiful street in London filled with embassies.  Rather than stand in the rain, I popped over next door to the bookstore at the Royal Institute of British Architects and indiscriminately bought three niche books on London (none of them on architecture.)   One of them, “This is London” by Ben Judah, is a collection of real life stories of the world of London’s immigrants – more than a third of the 8.5 million people who live in the margins of this city, far away from embassy row.  I haven’t been able to put it down.   The people I am reading about did not receive the same welcome as I.

And so the headline is: “We Love London.”  Of course we do.   We are privileged.  We have a picture perfect set up.  Truthfully we will never know what the non-expat immigrant experience is like in London but I hope that we have experiences that push us out of our comfort zones.  We’ve taken some small steps.  Like Colin traveling to Zone 3 on two Tube lines for 45 minutes to play on a basketball team of non-white British boys where he’s the odd man out (and I am kind of freaking out that he will soon be doing this on his own.)  We all need our own regular odd man out experiences to tenderize us for empathy.

It dawns on me with my serendipitous stop at Curators Coffee and the bookstore at the Royal Institute of British Architects; the London I will curate in my blog will both grossly oversimplify the diversity of a rapidly evolving city and sometimes forget the lonely in a city known for its energy.  Of course it will.  I will therefore do my best to tell you about the London I come to know.  Forgive me in advance for when that seems to come off as either entitled or food focused or awkwardly preachy or obvious.  Obviously no one needs another good reason to visit London … This is London ...and you will make it Your London.