convenient cages

I love the smell of toasted brown bread. Mmm.

The joys of apartment living: hearing other people’s arguments.

I saw the sun today. It is becoming a rarity so I feel like I should note every time it happens.

I saw a little 8 or 9-year-old girl riding the same bus as me the other day. She struck me because she looked like she could have been an American girl. I say this because nowadays, kids in the States are incredibly fashionable at a young age. (I think back to when I was in elementary school, and remember the fashion conscious bug really didn’t hit me until the 6th grade, and then I really didn’t go anything about it until 8th or 9th grade. I didn’t really pay attention to it until I realized other people around me did.) This particular little girl had a pink and grey backpack, which matched her pink and grey socks peeking out from under her skirt and tall boots. She also had a matching pink glitter hair tie. To top if off, she had a striped pink scarf. This girl was cute. There was, however, one dead give away that she couldn’t be American, and was actually Belarusian: she was carrying a plastic bag with her. If you take a quick survey of people on the public transportation, you can easily see that 90% of the people riding the bus or metro are carrying a plastic bag. It may hold their groceries, their schoolbooks, their work or important papers, their umbrella, … who knows. But everyone seems to carry them - men, women, elderly, working class, students, and kids alike. (Not me.)

I was talking to my roommate the other day. We were talking about transportation. In Minsk, there are many cars, but most people use buses, trams, trolleys, and metro. Of course this is in stark contrast to how most Americans get around, mainly by car and only by public transportation if they live in a big city. Even then, people often drive first to their stop to get the train into the city if they don’t actually live in the center. My roommate shared about her friend in Minsk who bought and started driving a car in the past year. Apparently, she has begun missing public transportation. She misses seeing all the people.

I wondered whether any Americans would be able to relate to this… would anyone actually prefer to give up their car, which affords them convenience, privacy, comfortability, freedom, complete control over temperature, music, speed… and choose to deal with the inconvenience of waiting for and catching buses, standing for long periods of time, being surrounded and at times squashed by other people, often feeling cold from the continual drafts coming through the opening and shutting doors, being at the complete mercy of the driver and the traffic that day…? It seems very unlikely to me that any American would rather choose this. But this is also because we have grown so accustomed and reliant on our cars. We don’t even really carpool anymore. Spouses rarely share a car. Work partners rarely travel together. But over here, people are not used to having their own space, their own privacy, in their vehicles. So now, some people who have experienced this convenience are longing for the people that are absent from their personal automobile. They miss the interaction and the connection to their people, their neighbors you could say.

So my roommate concluded that she doesn’t think she could ever live in America. She says that for her, as well as her friend, she likes the metro and the buses. Her favorite part of the day is taking public transportation.

Something in me doesn’t fully “get it.” I suppose it has something to do with the fact that I’m American and I love driving… But part of me also dreams of giving up my car and just biking everywhere. I don’t, notice, dream of giving up my car and taking public buses everywhere.

I now have to wonder and ask and push the question, are we as Americans missing out on something by leading our lives the way we do, or, in the words penned by my favorite band, “do we know what life is outside of our convenient Lexus cages”? Is there something “Gone” that needs to be regained?