No car, no problem

It has been three and a half months since we left Canada. Put the car in the garage with some Sta-bil in the tank and stored the battery in a warm place. Since I have been in Germany I have not driven a car, nor have I even been a passenger in a car. There has been no need.

This is wonderfully liberating as I do not need to drive to the supermarket to fetch the daily necessities. Back in Canada, the endless rigamarole of schlepping to the mini-mall, parking the car, walking across the 4-acre parking lot to get to the airplane-hangar-sized store just so I can buy a bag of milk at non-usurious prices is a real pain in the ass. Of course, having gone to the trouble of getting there I might as well pick up a few other things so that I won't have to trudge all the way back here tomorrow. Then I get to stand in line behind a dozen fuglies in order to pay. Christ, I just wanted some frickin' milk! Then it's off to find some Molson because apparently society will come apart at the seams if we are permitted to buy beer at the same place we buy beer nuts. Naturally, the beer store is located in a different mini-mall a short drive (but a long walk) away. So I get to repeat the whole dance all over again: park the car next to a minivan with truck nutz, walk across another vast parking lot to the charmless commercial plaza, stand in line again behind folks who have tattoos on their necks yet who are also wearing clown-sized shorts and designer-brand flip-flops.

Besides being a colossal waste of time, it results in a really ugly built environment. The "generica"* we have chosen to build for ourselves is not an enjoyable way to live. This is the credo of the writer and social critic James Howard Kunstler who describes the suburbs as "the greatest waste of resources in history". Not simply because it takes a lot of gas to drive around in an SUV collecting packages of processed food, but also because our most important resource - our lives - is spent in such unnecessary ugliness.

So being able to walk to the local grocery store from home here in Bonn, even if the prices are a bit higher, certainly is nice. The only disadvantage is the difficulty in purchasing liquids in family-sized quantities. I can carry a few litres of milk, juice, and pop on my bike without any problem and that lasts us a few days. But it is hard to ride all the way from the getrank with a 10-litre crate of beer bottles. The solution is to drink more wine as there is a Jacques' Wine Depot a stone's throw from my place.

* = The homogenized land of mini-malls and 4-lane streets that are the same anywhere you go in North America