OUR SECOND MONTH IN SYDENHAM

(To see our earlier posts (if you haven't already), including pictures of our flat in Sydenham, scroll down to the bottom of the blog and click on archives.)

It's hard to believe we've been in London for two months -- and that we have only one month remaining of our stay.  Time just flies by.  Our list of things to do is still growing but we're doing our best to hit all the high points.  We enjoy living in Sydenham.  It's easier to pretend we really live here on the days when we stay close to home (doing laundry, local marketing, just taking the bus to the supermarket, or visiting local restaurants or pubs).   It's easy to feel at home here. 

One of the things we wanted to do by staying in London was to experience living in a (capital C) CITY.  I've read that people who live in big cities actually live in a village (their own part of it).  That seems right -- when we walk around Sydenham it feels like a village.  But, we can jump on the bus or train  (two minutes from home) and be at London Bridge or Victoria Station in just a few more minutes -- and we're ready to experience all the bustle and activity and things to see and do that the City offers on a daily basis.

Started writing this one day and the next they discovered those car bombs near Picadilly Circus--about 15 miles from where we live and definitely an aspect of the big city we (and everybody else) could do without.  We're just watching the news on the internet and going ahead with our daily plans. 

In all other parts of London besides our own borough, we are, of course more typical tourists with the requisite cameras, bag and water-bottles.  So that part's not quite like living here -- we'd have to stay a lot longer to become blase enough to leave the camera at home (except in our own village).   

Good public transportation is amazing.  We don't know why people here own cars. 

Comments

[Geoff]

MASS TRANSIT:

Of course, we're all from the western US and even living in a city like Seattle with tons of buses, or Portlands uber-cool light rail, there is still barely mass transit, compared to New York, London, Paris, etc.

Here in Greater Denver the bus company motto is "Hey, you're poor, so shut up and suffer."

I want to see inter-city mass transit, like all of Europe. Las Vegas to LA is supposed to get a high-speed train, which would be cool.

[diane]

That must have been scary. My daughter lived there then and was on the train following the one bombed.