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Published: April 14th 2007
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Sheep
These sheep are at a beer garden near Amersee. If we hadn't had a car, we couldn't have gone there. The headlines overwhelm you with warnings of global warming, gas prices, and other reasons not to drive an SUV, or any car for that matter. Walk! Take the bus! Get a moped! Ride your bike! Those are all "greener" alternatives. I know that. They're not the reasons we gave up our cars when we moved here, though. For one thing, my husband's company paid for our move and wasn't willing to pay to have our 2 cars moved. Or even one car, for that matter. We could have paid to have a car shipped over ourselves, but that would have entailed organizing yet one more thing. And the car we would have shipped would have required some modifications to comply with European standards. We'll just buy a car, we thought. But once we worked the budget out, that wasn't as easy as it seemed. After all, we were going from two salaries to one, a small mortgage payment to a large rent payment... We can do without a car, we decided. After all, our apartment had easy access to two tram lines and many bus lines. Just around the corner were a grocery store, multiple bakeries, and a green grocier.
Going for a walk
This walk is thanks to having a car. Without the car, I wouldn't have had time for the walk. No car, no problem.
And so we did it. Sold the cars, moved out to Germany, bought monthly passes for public transportation (called IsarCard) here in Munich. My husband took Tram 18 to Isartor, then the S-Bahn to work. I took Tram 18 to Reichenbachplatz to German class. Why would you want a car in the city, we asked ourselves. I was so happy to hop on the tram and do my homework on the way to school. Didn't have to find a parking place, just hopped off and walked through Viktualienmarkt, the largest farmer's market in the city, to my school. Levent was happy reading on the S-Bahn, and the 10-minute walk to work provided good exercise. If we need a car, we'll rent one, we told ourselves. So my husband and my very-pregnant self took the S-Bahn to Ikea to buy supplies (only a one-hour trip! each way! with Ikea bags filled to the brim on the return!) and one evening we had an adventure trying to get to Wal-Mart (which we did not frequent in the US) with the S-Bahn (we arrived three minutes before closing time). Things were going great...
It's amazing how many little things you have to buy, even though the moving company delivered the vast majority of the things we had needed. We had to buy extension cords (US ones don't work here), a shower curtain, toilet brush, cleaning supplies, a vacuum, a toaster, an electric tea kettle. And of course the kitchen cabinet was bare, so every day I'd go to the grocery store and bring home as much as an 8-month-pregnant woman can carry three blocks uphill. Who needed a car?! It didn't occur to us to rent a car for, say, a week, to just get all this stuff done, asap. We were determined to use public transportation, and we did.
When Kaan was born at the end of November, my husband and my dad took public transportation to and from the hospital for 4 days to visit me - an hour in each direction even though it would have been 20 minutes by car. Why didn't we rent one?? I think there were reasons. For one thing, in retrospect I think we were slightly intimidated by the city, not knowing our way around (they rent cars with GPS, but somehow this didn't occur to me). Not knowing where to park was perhaps a fairly legitimate excuse. Were we just being cheap? Whatever the reasons, they weren't really good enough. The best explanation is probably that we just hadn't rented one before. So many things about our life were new, that one more new thing was perhaps just too much to handle. So we didn't rent a car until August, eleven months after we had first arrived. We drove through Austria and Switzerland to Italy (see entry: Trip to Lago di Como). From then on, we rented cars all the time... perhaps an indication that in fact it was the initial energy of figuring out how to do it that had been preventing us from renting a car all along.
Not having a car after Kaan was born was harder than not having a car before - I could bring home fewer groceries while pushing a stroller (even with the use of the carrying compartment underneath) than I could when 8 months pregnant. It was the end of purchasing drinks, other than milk and the occasional beer - too heavy. If I ran out of flour, sugar, milk, potatoes, or anything else heavy, I would literaly become stressed over it. "Oh no, another difficult trip to the market," I'd think. I started to understand why Germans eat the way they do - cold cuts and bread for dinner as opposed to anything requiring heavy vegetables or fresh meats. In addition to the weight, with babies, they only have limited windows in which you can get stuff done - between feedings when they're infants, between meals and naps and cranky times when they're toddlers. And so when the trip to the grocery store is a twenty-minute walk rather than a five-minute drive, you're making the shopping window very small. So the equation is: small shopping window + small carrying capacity = Mummy goes to the grocery store almost every day and begins to hate grocery stores with a passion.
Once we learned how to rent cars, we rented them a lot. We moved to a small town in February, where instead of being a few blocks away, the nearest grocery store was at best a half-hour walk away. And when it's a blustery, cold day that is a miserable hour-long commute. We realized we needed a car, but did not have the energy to figure out the system - do we lease or buy? New or used? Gas or diesel? We got very lucky in the car department, and scored a diesel SUV company car.
Yesterday, I took Kaan for a walk. We didn't have to go to the grocery store or pharmacy or anywhere else. It was a walk for the sake of walking. If we hadn't had the car, I wouldn't have done that. I would have probably walked around doing errands, stressed and wishing I could relax because walking with a purpose is not the same as strolling for its own sake. But yesterday, we strolled on a walking path with a golden field of mustard on one side and blooming apple trees on the other. Kaan giggled and pointed out every butterfly and bee he saw. Before I knew it, an hour and a half had gone by. The only downside is that I felt bad that poor Levent had to be working so we could pay for the car so I could walk through fields of gold.
I filled up the car's gas tank for the first time today, for 65 Euros. That's around $90 US. So we ain't gonna be driving when we don't need to. But the "dream" of living without a car... I'm glad we've woken up.
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bob
non-member comment
fascinating
these 'travel' blogs are addictive... other peoples stories are interesting when laced with humour and well written, tho' of course its down to personal style and taste. liked your story esp living the 'dream' of being carless. great stuff, hope all continues to go well.