un-homesick... and sidewalks?

Three different women in the past three days have asked me the same, perplexing question. It invariably comes immediately as a follow-up to a question on how I like London, and it goes something like this, “Are you a bit homesick?”

Hmmm, is this condition called homesickness expected of recent expatriates? Am I betraying an un-patriotic nature by declaring that quite the contrary, no I am certainly not suffering from said disorder?

Do I miss my friends and family? Sure I do! I miss them tons! But this is also such an exciting adventure – such a wonderful opportunity to be in the most beautiful cosmopolitan city in the world! Why would I taint such a gift with homesickness?

When I lived in Paris, I did get very homesick after a month or so. I remember going home for Thanksgiving very well – after the passport guy at US immigration stamped my passport he smiled this huge, broad smile and exclaimed, “Welcome home!” I was so thrilled to be back to American friendliness and just plain speaking English. But here in London, despite the (albeit many) variations on pronunciation, vocabulary, and orthography, I don’t have to rehearse in my mind what I need to ask for when going into a store or ordering at a restaurant – and quite frankly, living in NYC for two years has inured me to rudeness. The prospect of strangers smiling at me on the streets makes me shudder (why are they smiling?) and so I am quite at home on the unfriendly London sidewalk. In fact, so far I have found the London sidewalk to be a tad more polite than the NYC one. Perhaps this has more to do with the generally wider girth of the pavement than with differing constitutions. If Londoners had to deal with a two-foot wide Lexington Ave sidewalk in rush hour, I am sure they too would shoulder roughly and rudely through groups of bumbling Italian tourists too.

In fact, sidewalks, mundane as it may seem, are one of the things I like so much more about London. In addition to actually being wide enough for two people to pass comfortably they are CLEAN! SO CLEAN! It’s just lovely, my friends. Do you know why they are so clean? If I told you the cars never have to move from their curb-side perches for noisy, ugly street cleaning machines would you scratch your head and mumble, “huh? How do they clean the streets?” Why with actual human beings of course! There is a man, with a wheely cart/trash bin and he goes around each and every car tire, sweeping up all the dirt and debris!! The guy on our small section of street was outside my window for a good two hours making sure our sidewalks and curbsides were clean enough to eat off of. Think how many jobs that would create for our unemployed NYC residents? Put those machines that seem to make the sidewalks and curbs more dirty than they were to begin with in the junkyard. Bring back good old manual labor!

And while we’re on the subject of trash… I love our Camden Council trash and recycling program (programme?). We have these little brown bins in our little courtyard where you put your leftover food and teabags which they then take to their composting center! They also come into our little courtyard to take the trash out of the bins so that you don’t have to leave your trash on the curb, and same with the recycling! It’s so convenient, and you don’t have to maneuver around unsightly heaps of foul-smelling trash, ever. Lovely. Just lovely. I love England. Wait, I mean, I’m so homesick for that time when NYC trash-men just didn’t pick up the trash for more than a week and you had to precariously walk through the one-foot gap between the 10-ft tall, malodorous, behemoth pile of disgusting garbage bags and the building!

I seriously love this city, and I’ve only seen a small fraction of it! Once I put this apartment in order (our sea shipment hopefully comes this week), it will be time to put Operation Explore London in full gear. And then once I’m tired of seeing London, maybe then I’ll start to get homesick. But somehow I feel like that is impossible. As Samuel Johnson once said, “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.”