Touring Epping (London
Suburb, UK) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget – Ruth Pennington Paget
While Laurent went off to work, I got Florence all dolled up after breakfast to go out strolling in the town of Epping on the east side of London.
Epping
is on the Underground (Subway) line, which really makes it a suburb of
London. You can read a book on the way
into the City from this pretty place with a huge forest outside it and be
rested and relaxed when you get to the office.
Your
spouse can drive you to the station in Epping while he or she shops for
groceries and does car maintenance during the week, making the car available
for traveling on the weekend. In an
emergency downtown, everyone could Uber or Lyft out to their homes or emergency
pick-up point.
I
think that life situation is a pretty good set up, which you can have in Epping. People in Chicago live like this. (Check out the towns of Geneva and Batavia
around Chicago.)
Epping
has a lot of sidewalks, so I walked into town with a stroller with no
problem. My husband’s colleague gave me
British translations for my non-stop American English: “We call ‘sidewalks’ a ‘path’ here.”
I
wondered if the British beat the paths of London like Americans beat the
sidewalks of Chicago. I had already done
a lot of sidewalk beating in my short lifetime:
-looking
for jobs
-delivering
project bids
-selling
consulting services
-fundraising
for libraries, youth groups, and school activities
At
this point in my life, I wanted to beat the sidewalk for cultural enrichment.
Our
first stop in town was the Tesco supermarket where I bought food for
Florence. You can learn a lot about
another culture by visiting a supermarket.
The first thing I noticed in the store was the limited selection of baby
food. There were only seven kinds and
that worried me.
I
suspected that the British started giving children “adult” food sooner than the
French. The wife of one of Laurent’s British
colleagues confirmed this for me. The
French at that time gave children a liquid “cereal” in a bottle, which I did
not like.
I
made food for Florence, used some French liquid cereal, and bought expensive
American baby food. My daughter is
strong and healthy as an adult, and I am glad I fed her the way I did.
The
store had lots of custard and pudding desserts, which you did not have in
France. Even the group Pink Flloyd made
fun of pudding, but it is full of calcium and protein for building
muscles. Tesco also only had
concentrated juice and not fresh juice.
I liked to drink orange juice once a day as an American.
I
learned quite a bit about what kinds of foods the British like to eat on my
45-minute shopping trip to the Tesco supermarket.
Living
in Japan as an exchange student and hosting foreign exchange students from many
countries (Youth for Understanding, People-to-People, Sister Cities, and
American Field Service programs) taught me what good places supermarkets are
for buying souvenirs like cookies, candy, and magazines for learning English
and foreign languages (British English dialect and punctuation in my case).
With
the souvenirs and baby food in hand, I set out to explore Epping, which I saw
as a nice suburb of London, if we ever had to live in London one day.
By
Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
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