London Bus #230

WOOD GREEN, LONDON
Aside from preparing for and teaching classes—which have gone quite well at first, I’m pleased to report—a lot of my time this past week has been spent figuring out transport.  I’ve been studying  tube lines (there are 11 different ones in London), planning flights and train rides for weekend excursions (and trying to figure out in vain some way to purchase a cheap ticket), and the past two days Lily and I have been trying to figure out the myriad bus lines that crisscross the city.

Our first objective was to plan a route to her swim practice at Tottenham Green Leisure Centre.  Yesterday, for her first day of training, we gave up on taking the bus because a neighbor acquaintance of mine told me it was perfectly safe to walk. Besides mid-September in London the sky stays reasonably bright until about 8 pm.

Back to my story about the bus. . .Our walk was brisk and pleasant but I did end up feeling a little uncomfortable strolling through an unknown neighborhood so we decided to take the bus on the way home.  We took our chance on taking the correct number; any one that stopped along Philip Lane would probably take us to Turnpike Lane, our home tube stop.  We waited, and waited and waited.  Across the street was a well-lit green grocers, so we felt pretty secure.  Finally, after about 20 minutes (the schedule said 12 minutes) a double decker bus arrived.  We climbed aboard, swiped our passes and walked up to the upper deck.  It was a lovely ride home looking down on all the lanes and the lights of the early evening.  And then an easy walk back home from the tube stop.

Today we decided to take the bus both ways.  Lily charted our route and figured out which bus stop on the High Street we should stand by.  (Buses here are both numbered and lettered—don’t ask me why—you need to know both the number of the bus and the letter of the appropriate bus stop before you set out.)  I had dashed home from my Shakespeare class for a quick bite, but we still left by 7 pm, in plenty of time to reach the Leisure Centre at 7:30, or so we thought.  We stopped at stop “MA” along with a cluster of other shoppers and commuters: a woman in a long dress and head scarf with three squirrely toddlers, several middle aged Middle Eastern women carrying shopping bags, a young man in sunglasses (at dusk), smoking a cigarette.  Bus after bus pulled up at the stop with all the different numbers posted on the sign: W4, 123, 184, etc.  It looked like about nine different buses used the stop “MA.”  After fifteen minutes we started scanning the number of each approaching bus, sure that ours would be next.  Bus riders came and went, mounted and dismounted.  The minutes ticked by VERY slowly and now it was 7:25.  No way would we make it to practice on time.  We should have walked this time, too.

One of the women shoppers then approached and asked us which bus we were waiting for.  She said she had been waiting over 45 minutes for #230 and that’s when Lily and I decided to cross the street and try another bus line/route.  We saw the bus we wanted up ahead, so we crossed at the light and dashed toward it.  We couldn’t see where it would stop, however.  We kept racing up the High Street until suddenly Lily noticed the #230 coming straight toward us.  By now we were a few hundred yards from our original bus stop so we had to run in a very undignified way back in the other direction to catch up with the now long line of riders who were waiting for the same bus.  Later Lily told me that the woman who said she had been waiting for 45 minutes actually came to the stop after we did—which goes to show that “patience is a virtue” (did Shakespeare coin that phrase?) especially when riding buses is concerned. 

Epilogue: Lily made it to practice only 15 minutes late.

Beth