London is All About Transportation

It's interesting to me how much of my life here has been wrapped around getting from point A to point B.

In California, I'd just jump in the car and go. If I needed to take more people, I'd choose the Suburban. If not, the Beetle. I know where all the roads are, where they go, what time of day one should avoid certain routes, etc. If I needed to be somewhere at a certain time, I'm reasonably certain that I could arrive on time, or even early if I wanted to. And if my normal path was blocked by road work, or an accident, I usually have a number of alternatives that wouldn't take me too far out of the way to get there.

I know what stores I would go to to get the things I need, and about how much they should cost, and what order I would go to those stores to minimize my travel time. And I know how I would get those things back to my house. I've never much thought about how easy that all is in Southern California.

But in London, that's all different. I'm afraid to drive on the left, so I'm using public transportation. It's MUCH cheaper, and in my case, less dangerous. I have to travel on the train's schedule, not mine. So I end up waiting at the stations for much longer than I planned for.

And the trains don't always go to the same place as they did the day before. Sunday schedules are very much more restricted than the Saturday's are. There's a train that goes from Nunhead station to Lewisham station during the week and on Saturdays, which I used to move one of my suitcases to the house yesterday. It only took my half an hour to get between the two. But today, the train didn't stop at Nunhead, so I took the bus. It took almost an hour and a half to get there. Transportation.

It was a nice ride, with a number of families riding with me. Which had two effects on me. One, it made me feel much more comfortible about my family getting around on the bus. But the other effect was that it made me miss them even more. The closer it gets to their arrival, the more I miss them.

After church today, I went to IKEA to get some mattresses for our house. First, I found out that they only had 3 of them in stock, instead of the 6 that I wanted. Then I found that IKEA's delivery service is "next-day" only. But there won't be anyone at my house tomorrow to receive them. So I just bought one and carried it back with me to the house. Tomorrow I'm going to go to try to get the other five and hire a driver to take me home with them. Transportation.

When my family arrives, I'm planning on meeting them at the airport. That means there will be six of us with all the luggage for five, needing to get from the airport, which is west of London, to our house, which is in the southeast. I got on the internet and found a company that has an 8 seater van thing that can take us all home. £80 for the trip. I think that's reasonable, though I think it might take us 2 hours to get there. Transportation.

The tube and buses and the tram all use a system called Oyster. It's card that you can "top-up" with money and just tap it on a reader as you enter and exit a station. It's very convenient and apparently has really turned the whole London transportation system into a profitable enterprise for the city. But of course, the British Rail Services don't use Oyster, so that's a different system that I have to use. I haven't been able to figure out how to get a monthly pass for the British Rail Services, but I need to, since I'll be commuting on it everyday for work. Transportation.

I've found that I can only get about one errand completed on a given weekend day, unless I can complete the task on the internet. It just takes so long to get anywhere, and I don't know enough about how to get around to plan it out any better.

I hope this post doesn't sound like I'm complaining, though I admit it does have a negative tone. I'm just trying to share some of the difficulties of living in a different country. It's still quite an adventure, and I'm having a good time, but sometimes it takes a lot of time to get to where I'm going.

Dave