Cars and Monkeys

One of the biggest changes in my life since moving to Sweden is a quintessentially European thing: I no longer have a car. Just before I moved, I sold the only car I'd ever owned, my beloved Nissan Altima, to a guy who came to my house, paid me about a buck fifty plus some pocket lint, and drove it away. If I hadn't pulled an all-nighter packing to prepare for my flight across the Atlantic, I probably would have felt pretty sad.

Now that I'm here, I've more or less gotten used to it, and I realized that I am nowhere near as dependent on having a car as I had thought. Of course, a lot of that has to do with the location—the public transportation system here in Stockholm is thankfully quite good (however: would it absolutely kill you to run the subway on weeknights until 1am? Would it??), and my apartment is located less than five minutes' walk from a subway line, a bus stop, and a regional train station. As a friend of mine points out in one of his blog entries (unfortunately there are no HTML anchors in the text, so you'll have to scroll down to "Your car makes you an asshole"), it's not such a bad idea to do without for a while. Besides, gas here costs about a bajillion dollars a gallon (yeah, yeah, I know, it's SEK per liter. Wanna do the math? Be my guest. At the end of half an hour with a calculator you will still find that I am right about the cost. And you will have just wasted half an hour of your life, sitting there all alone with a calculator.), and aside from the occasional run to the grocery store to stock up on groceries, I don't really need it.

I figure that I will probably buy a car when I return to the States (unless I end up smack dab in the middle of some big city). I'm not sure about what kind I'm going to get, but that decision can wait until I really need to make it. In the meantime, though, as a followup to my previous posts about places I'd want to visit, I recently read about two places I definitely do not want to live: Arlington, VA and New Haven, CT. Yeah, yeah, I know there is a famous university in New Haven, and one of my best friends lives there, but if I ever saw someone trying to jack my car out of my own driveway, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be all that diplomatic. I would be far more likely to activate the theft retrieval system instead.

For the time being, however, I will just revel in my newfound Euro-ness (well, sort of—I haven't started wearing black turtlenecks and drinking espresso yet) and save a bit of money instead of spending it on gas (no, wait... "petrol").

Maybe I can save enough to buy a nice new calculator.