Tips For Adulthood: Five Things To Savor About London

Every Wednesday I offer tips for adulthood.

Well, I’m back.

Back from a lovely holiday in Barcelona. (Thanks to my Facebook friends for setting me straight on Stephen Sondheim. Turns out I’m not alone in having such an intimate familiarity with all things Sondheim. I’m in good Company you might say. Heh heh…)

Back from a last-minute, whirlwind trip to Boston.

And back from a 5 day, take-no-prisoners assault on my inbox, which I’m pleased to report is down to a manageable 67 messages. I feel at least 10 pounds lighter. More on that next week.

Whenever I travel to the United States, I can’t help but take note of the things I really love about living there and the things that I’m not so keen about. On this particular trip, the first category of items was dominated by the elegant, LARGE digital washing machine and tumble dryer that reside in the home of the friends who hosted us in Boston.

Regular readers of this blog will know of my ongoing “issues” with the ecologically-correct-but-essentially-worthless-tubs-which-pass-for-washer-slash-dryer-combos in this country. Suffice to say, they’re for the birds. So I practically leapt with joy when I realized that I’d accumulated enough laundry during our stay in America to try out my friends’ sleek, modern washing machine and (separate!!) dryer. The lights! The gentle hum! The lovely WARM clothes that emerged at the end of the cycle!

Bliss.

At the other end of the spectrum was the over-load of stuff that you find everywhere you go in America. For me, it hit home when I went into a (two-story) CVS drug store in Harvard Square and literally had to sit down to contemplate the plethora of choices for buying a child’s toothbrush. A tooth brush, mind you!

Inhale to Prepare had a great post awhile back on what she calls the “the “Whuf” question – i.e. “What if we moved back to the States?”

As a fellow expat, I can completely relate. It’s impossible not to. Unless you’re 100% sure that you’ll live abroad your entire life, you constantly weigh the balance between what you’d give up – and what you’d gain – if you were to repatriate. (For an excellent primer on this topic, see Writerhead’s recent discursis on parallel parking.)

Inhale To Prepare asks herself the “Whuf” question rhetorically on a constant basis in order to appreciate more fully the things she loves about living in London. In that vein, here are five things I savor about London:

1. Free Museums. Everyone knows that London is home to some of the most breath-taking museums in the world: The British Museum, Tate Modern, as well as several lesser-known but equally compelling ones. What they don’t always appreciate is that 90% of these are free. That’s right. You just walk in off the street and check out the Elgin Marbles. When we were back in Boston, we tried to visit its storied Museum of Science one morning. The price of entry for a family of four? Eighty bucks. No kidding. Even my 10-year-old thought that it wasn’t worth it. In light of the current economic crisis over here, I’m sure that museums – and other cultural policy institutions – will undoubtedly have to re-think their financing models (and their ticket prices). But for now, boy are government-funded arts organizations hugely valuable to our family.

2. Free Health Care. And speaking of government funded, my quick trip back home also made me value the nationalized health care system they have in place in the U.K. I’ve waxed poetic before about why I prefer the so-called public option. But every time I go back home and face some unforeseen medical issue, I value it all the more. This time, I’d run out of medicine for my migraines and needed to get some more pills. Fortunately, I know plenty of doctors in the States, so I was able to get a prescription called in to a local pharmacy near where we were staying. But I’d forgotten what it is to need health insurance for your prescriptions. I had to wait in a lengthy line to give the pharmacist all of my details (even though I’d never see this place again) and then had to shell out $20 for like six pills because I had no insurance. Yipes! Thank goodness I didn’t need more than six!  Health care may be changing in the U.K. but it will never reach a point where it isn’t universally provided. And for that, dear Britannia, I am eternally grateful.

3. The BBC. I love you, NPR. Really I do. But pound for pound, you are no match for the BBC in terms of breadth of programming, depth of worldwide coverage and no-holds-barred interviewing styles. I came home to a riveting analysis of the whole Royal Wedding thang followed by a dissection of the philosophical foundations of free will. What’s not to love?

4. Fast food. This may sound like an odd item to add to the list of  someone who’s openly slammed America’s love affair with fast food in the past. And don’t get me wrong: the U.K. has its share of disgusting fast food. (And a corresponding obesity crisis to go with it.) But there are some really great, healthy fast food chains that I’d love to see transplanted to America. Check out this slideshow to preview just a few.

5. The weather. Ah, now you surely *will* call me crazy. But not so fast. Yes, it does rain here. A lot. But not as much as people think. And it’s nothing a good, sturdy pair of Wellies can’t handle. More importantly, it never, ever gets very cold. Proof in the pudding? You can run, year-round, outdoors. That’s right. No need for a gym membership (unless you want one). Ever. Love that.

 

Image: Wellies by Gerry Balding via Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

 

 

 

 

 

7 Comments
  • Reply Rebecca

    May 4, 2011, 3:32 pm

    Pret is here! I go there about 5 times per week.

  • Reply Erin

    May 4, 2011, 10:46 pm

    I have to agree with every point. The weather in particular – since I’ve been here (15 months) the weather has been rather agreeable. And recently (and last summer) it was gloriously sunny. BBC rocks! It took some time for me to come around to this – but once I tuned in – WOW! The museums are all amazing as well. Another bonus for this history buff – a castle on every country corner, and all the history I read about as a child is here for the exploration. Magnificent!

  • Reply Kristin Bair O'Keeffe

    May 5, 2011, 12:20 am

    So happy you’re back! Love this post…especially the part about a good pair of Wellies taking care of most things. I keep a pair in Ireland (at my husband’s brother’s farm) for my all-Ireland-all-weather fun, and I’m about to add a pair to my U.S. shoe collection. B.I.H. (before Irish husband) I had no idea what Wellies were…now I can’t live without them.

    Great pic!

  • Reply Patricia

    May 5, 2011, 1:51 am

    I would like to experience all these things…just think on that!

    Oh yes! we have these huge washing machines with all the bells and whistles and truly they do not clean ! One must now use all these chemical additives and other muck to get things clean….And they do not recycle water – they only use drinking water which is now full of chlorine…bleach to you all you fishes.

    I have a separate dryer but only use it to do the towels in the deep of monsoon season here…to keep the mildew levels down.

    Europe did not disregard and ignore the Kyoto Agreement….they have tons of Net Zero Housing and whole cities that run on their own carbon free grids. We are jealous at our house!!! In 2010 London was the top city in the world for Carbon Emissions Control.

    Now that couple at the diner have succeeded in getting us these wacko laws that cut our transit systems and in our state we have to get a 2/3rds vote from the people…who do not understand what they are civic ally volunteering for or screaming about ( thus all our schools are not energy efficient and full of asbestos) Of course, we can threaten to kill our elected officials at top lung volume and thus many, many folks are attempting…even our local officials and well you already wrote about the health care….and you have not even broached the subject of how we treat the elderly and elder care.

    Well, and medicare is going away and Planned Parenthood is fighting for it’s life…. And folks think that when they need care it will be there….ah I wish I was there….because after buying my own health ins. for 62 years now, I don’t even know if we can afford comfort care and certainly not to be buried or a memorial service.

    Death and Taxes….I thought we came here originally for representation…but of course, it would not be pc to say we have our own terrorist and dictators right here.

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