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Archive for March, 2008

I’ve had some great travel expereinces on trains in China and some not so good travel tales but they are always an experience and I’ve found them interesting and on the whole enjoyable. 

In the UK It’s a different matter.  I spend more than 3 hours a day commuting to and from work on an overpriced, slow and very uncomfortable train. Across a very boring dull landscape surrounded by anti-social morons shouting into their phones or subjecting the others to what they’re listening to on their IPODs.  Some people refer to these people as  commuters, but I think primitive androids is a more accurate description.  

 I cannot possibly imagine how people do this for most of their working lives.  I’ve only been doing this for months and I’m tired already…   I can only think it must be that most people doing this do it out of routine, apathy and insular thinking - ’it’s what all my friends do’ etc etc etc . I cannot believe that anybody enjoys commuting into London by train, so why do it for most of your life?  

I’m doing it for the prospects, once I get the opportunity to go elsewhere, I’m gone!

I’ve been trying to work out why when I was in China commuting to work it wasn’t like this for me.  In China I had some equally long commutes (sometimes longer) but the difference is that at least there each day was eventful - I would literally see different things each day.  It was a learning experience.

Sometimes It was uncomfortable, hot, cramped -often I was wishing the train was faster; but I never felt as if I was wasting my time- the feeling I get here when I’m travelling.   I guess the big reason behind this is that I am over familiar with the UK.  Being away for a while has given me  a wider perception on what life is like in the UK,  perhaps It’s realisation of just how rubbish many things actually are in this country.

It is for want of a better word - so incredibly Boring .

Whereas in China I would see things as interesting and different and new, Here everything just blends into a big long smudge.  The below picture pretty much sums it all up.