LILI AND ME
I don’t know what I expected in my visit to London. In fact, all of my expectations for the trip were upended one after another so in the end when I got to London I was just taking things as they came. There were three parts to the two week visit to London that dislocated me and taught me something.
The first I will get to today. When I first, almost on a whim, decided to go to Greece because of the cheap ticket that popped up on my screen, it was the air ticket for $550 rather than the usual $1200 that attracted me. The Airbnb with Efi in Greece was also not expensive, also $550. Travel suddenly seemed affordable.
But the Airbnb in Paris was $1800 and the Airbnb in London for two weeks, this time a room with shared bath and kitchen, was $700. And I realized that my big expense in this form of travel, hopping from place to place for a month at a time, was going to be housing and not the air ticket. On each of these first two country visits I was able to split the air ticket between two places making the travel costs lower per country.
In London all the Airbnb’s seemed to be offered as single rooms in a house rather than private apartments. And what I learned was that the chemistry of the person whose house it is and my chemistry matter for this to work. We are strangers from different cultural backgrounds and it is very easy to cross each other without knowing it. In addition, it was suddenly clear to me that I really was a guest in someone else’s house who had definite ideas about how she wanted to live herself and how she wanted her guests to behave. However, I was also a paying guest, paying what for me was a large amount of money, who therefore felt entitled to be treated hospitably and in a respectful, honored guest, manner. Because Lili, my host, and I had very different tastes and values in many ways, for an 85 year old American man there was bound to be tensions.
I never did learn Lili’s name. Her handle on line was Lili Frewfrew and she had a frewfrew type house. Everything was pink from the front wall of the house to the couch and chairs and refrigerator and cupboards and stove and what Lili wore. She is French living in England but I think her taste must be innate, not French, but very frewfrew, girly. And why not, she likes pink. She keeps a very, very clean house, an immaculate house and notices every trace of dirt or smudge or dropped tissue and comments on it. No shoes in the house. You take them off at the front door and if you want to use the garden patio, a beautiful patio, you have to fetch the shoes from the front and wear them on the patio, not walking in socks on the patio and then coming into the house. Because she has three small bedrooms on the second floor, one hers and two for guests, and an immaculate bathroom, it is important that guests take quick showers so that everyone can be accommodated in the morning, but it is also important that guests bathe often to keep the sheets clean. So that when I said that I wouldn’t clog up the bathroom because I only took a shower every third day she was perturbed and within the first week quizzed me to make sure I had taken my first shower, which I had. I was walking on eggs trying to be quiet enough and clean enough not to draw her ire, but I did draw it in any case, partly over suspicions about not bathing enough but mostly over inviting my brother for the second week. I had not planned for him to join me when I booked the room weeks before when I no idea he would be joining me (which was great fun). When, after arriving, I asked how much it would be for him to join me (in every other Airbnb when Susie joined me there was no extra cost) Lili first quoted 10 pounds a day but later remembered that she had invited friends of hers from Spain for three of those day and then panicked because she thought we would clog up the morning bathing. I again offered to not bathe for those three days which drew more irritation. So when Richard showed up she unloaded on him and then on me and I thought we were being kicked out of the house, which because of Airbnb rules on paying would have been very messy. We also had no place to go. So there was an icy calm for a day or two when it turned out that her guests were very early risers, Richard a late riser, and we never even saw each other or wanted to use the bathroom at the same time.
In the end Lili and I made peace. But when thinking about it now I realize that the tension was almost unavoidable. I had no doubt that Richard could join me (after all, we shared the same double bed, the crowding was caused by us not by her) I was just afraid that I would be upset by her charging more than I thought she should. She somehow didn’t care about the price but was very irritated that I just assumed that he could join me, even thought it was billed as a spacious room for two.
We simply were making very different assumptions. And after all, I realized, this was her house and she wanted to be in control of what happened and to live her life as she wanted. London is very expensive and for her to afford the house she had to rent out rooms whether she wanted to or not. She used the living room for the language classes she taught on line and for learning Arabic and for doing her Pilates on a mat that covered much of the floor while I was working around her trying to make my breakfast. She had a special skimpy (my view not hers) outfit and the first time I encountered the Pilates performance I thought I had caught her in her underwear (my view, not hers). I had no more idea what was proper for a French woman to wear in her own house than I did on how to negotiate the public bathrooms I often encountered in which both men and women used whatever stall was free and washed their hands in a common area. I was never quite sure whether I was in the woman’s bathroom or a joint bathroom and figured I would know when someone screamed.
All of this is to say that during my time in France and in London I was never sure when I was doing the right thing or the wrong thing. In France it took me a while to loudly announce bonjour when I walked into a new store and au revoir when I walked out. That isn’t the American way, but the American way of quiet nonchalance, after a while, came to seem downright unfriendly.
So in the end I have to accept Lili as she is and she came to tolerate me as I am. I itch when I bathe daily, Lili obviously doesn’t.
And an issue that never came up all because I realized that it was a cultural issue, was that even for my $700 I was always cold. I was cold because it was 45 F. in the morning and Lili never turned on the heat, I was cold because as soon as she got up at 45 F. Lili threw open her door and the bathroom window to freshen the house. I wore my thermal underwear, which I had brought as a precaution, a sweater and my winter coat. I was still cold with my fingers stiff as I typed, Lili obviously wasn’t. I think this is the European way with a great need for fresh air and a lifetime of living at a lower temperature. (When my children enter my house they often find it stifling, so very likely I am the person out of step.)
So what is the moral of this story? I think for a long term stay of two weeks or a month in a country where I am clueless (most places), I have to find a place with private bath and a minimal cooking area, even a hotplate. Short stays of three days or less might work because people can put up with irritating stuff for three days, but I need to be clear on expectations. The problem is mine, not Lili’s. She has set herself up for her own problems but she’ll have to work these out for herself, as she is doing. So this is lesson number one in London.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 