Today I zipped back to London for about 8 hours, and realised that I am missing the place less and less as time passes. 3 hours would have been enough and that was only because a friend cooked me a lovely breakfast in Crouch End before I headed into the City!
We've been in Germany nearly 3 years now, and although society here is undoubtedly more (insert as appropriate, depending on how controversial / xenophobic you feel...) formal / uptight / rule driven / boring / staid than that of the big smoke, I don't miss any of the everyday aggravation that comes as a freebie bolted onto the side of 'normal' life in London.
After living in Blighty's capital for some time you become accustomed to the way life is there, which is to say consuming and stressful, in the main. Desensitisation takes a while, but soon everything becomes "just the way it is here" and everyone soldiers on with a very British acceptance of how cr@p it actually is!
Everything is expensive, the place is absolutely filthy and gangs of malevolent knife wielding youths are seemingly sprouting up on every other street corner. (Certainly I managed to see one fight between quite a few 14/15 year old kids and another rather unpleasant group of kids "wid baaaad attitude" that I wouldn't fancy strolling through the middle of... at 9am, in Crouch End, a "nice" part of town!)
But the thing which struck me most, as I crawled into the City in a beaten up mini cab, is that getting from A to B whenever anyone else is awake takes bloody ages (whether by car or public transport). Crouch End is about 6 miles from The City, and using the bus/tube combination to cover this "commute" could sometimes take up to an hour each way. A good time was 30 minutes. Driving to our closest Tesco or Safeway at midday on a Saturday would be a traffic-jammed nightmare, although one plus in the UK that has not reached Germany yet is online grocery shopping. By using "green delivery van" options we used to feel ecologically okay about getting a big van to trundle through the traffic with our three bags of frozen veg in it :)
Here in Germany I live around 3 miles from the office. I drive to work each day, and when the traffic is REALLY bad it takes me 8 minutes. My record on a bank holiday is under 5, although the polizei might have had something to say about my speed along the way. Contrary to popular belief in the UK, we actually have regular (lower than you!) speed limits over here on approximately 98 percent of the roads. The 2 percent where you can do what you like are generally over crowded with BMW M5s and Escort Cosworths from Essex "seeing what it'll do (mister)". Anyway, I digress. Sometimes in the evening the whole city is logjammed and I take 15 minutes to get home, which is pretty stressful. So much so that I want to order a good Chinese takeaway for dinner....and then realise what it is I REALLLLY miss about London!!!
Germany, perhaps because of the Aldi effect, just does not get grocery shopping, period. One of the joys of coming back to the UK is not getting a cold shiver down my spine at the thought of frequenting a supermarket. Here a trip to Sainsburys, Tesco or Asda is actually a 'relatively' pleasant experience - from parking your car, the range of produce available, and (most importantly) the courteous nature of the checkout staff, who do not sneer and throw your weekly shopping down the conveyor and only smile when it starts spilling over onto the floor, then electing to send the next 'customers' goods down to pile up on top. Instead, you get asked if you would like some assitance packing your bags, sir :-)
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