I currently live in Wien. I think I had started to take just how easy life is here for granted, child in a buggy wise until my recent trip to New York. New York and Manhattan specifically is not a buggy friendly place. Much and all as I found it difficult, I could only imagine how difficult life would be there if you were in a wheelchair. I can carry a buggy in and out of a subway station and people generally volunteer to help you do just that, but a person in a wheelchair is bunched.
Waiting at the steps of St. Patrick’s to meet my father so he could lift the pram up the steps and we could go in.
Compare and contrast
~ in Wien, the trams come every couple of minutes, if one is an old style step up into, you know that there will be a wheelchair accessible one along in a minute. In New York, it is a total pain in the ass trying to find the subway entrance that has a lift.
~ in Wien, in my experience ALL the U-Bahn stations have lifts, so no line or section of line is precluded from a trip. In New York, whole sections of down town Manhattan have subway stations with no lifts.
~ in Wien, at pedestrian crossings, the entire pedestrian walkway slopes down gently, not some wheelchair wide really steep, really tiny section like in Manhattan.
~ in Wien, most of the shops only have one or maybe two steps up into them, not like an area such as SoHo where the beautiful cast-irons have several steps at a minimum
~ in Wien, all the trains have specific seats and areas allocated to parking prams, seats for pregnant women/parents with a child/the elderly/the physically handicapped/disadvantaged. In New York, there are no sections for prams/buggies and safety straps to hold onto them.
~ in Wien, despite a similar climate to New Yorks, all the shops do not seem to have double sets of HEAVY pull out/push in doors. I got so pissed off trying to open heavy doors that I stopped going into shops and department stores. Instead I fled to the tranquility of Central Park and various museums.
The MoMA cafe on 2, where we got into trouble for leaving our pram in the side aisle as it was a fire escape (fair enough) and the manager suggested moving the pram around the corner while the baby was sleeping in it. Seriously, where was his brain. Two people eating lunch sans baby, avec pram, and he thinks the child might be elsewhere than in the pram??
I love Manhattan, but struggling around there with a buggy really opened my eyes to the fact that it is a very difficult city to raise a child in and also that it must be a nightmare for anyone in a wheelchair. The American, car dependent culture really needs to wake up to the fact that life isn’t all about taxi cabs and cars. Some people have to use subways. They should be accessible to everyone AT EVERY STOP. The weird thing is, Manhattan specifically is a place where car ownership is far less than the American average, mostly, I suppose because people take taxis everywhere. But a taxi is only accessible if you clip your car seat into your buggy/stroller and a small infant cannot be kept in a car seat for a whole day in Manhattan. It is just bad for them. Infants need to sleep, reclined in their prams, or in a sling, not with their head tilted over in a carseat.
The new production at the Met.
My new take on Manhattan is that it is a place for shopping mini-breaks only, with my husband but not our child. At least not until she no longer requires a buggy or she is old enough to sit in her buggy most of the time but capable of getting out when I need to ascend or descend steps down into the burrows that make the city smaller than having to walk twenty or thirty blocks searching for a subway stop you won’t have to bounce your pram down into whilst holding your child in your arms. A risky activity for someone who has regular visions of dropping her child and the terrible trauma/tragedy that would ensue. So maybe when she is three I will take her back there, but not before. The jetlag is a whole other post. The cacophony of Manhattan is also a whole other post and one that requires ear muffs for a baby and really, under normal circumstances, there is no way I would take an infant to New York, but my brother lives there and he wanted to meet his niece, and for reasons of his own, was unable to travel to Vienna to meet her.
Sunset over Long Island sound.
I heart Vienna, it is a dream city to live in with a small baby. I won’t be taking it for granted again any time soon.
Yesterday was marked with a few medical appointments and I am by no means finished. One was at the hospital and the other with an obstetrician. Picture an obstetrician in their private rooms dressed in a white polo shirt and a white pair of trousers and you can picture the Austrian doctors and medical professionals. They all wear white. Pristine white. The only bit of colour seems to come from their choice of footware, Crocs are very popular. White in the hospital didn’t seem that out of the ordinary, but white in private rooms was odd. Consultants at home attire themselves in suits when in their rooms. At least the ones that I have seen do.
Following on from yesterday’s appointments, I have to go to a lab to have my bloods taken (there are labs dotted all over Vienna, it isn’t like going to Vincent’s phlebotomy clinic and queuing for hours) and I have to go to see another doctor next week for a more general medical check up so that she can check that everything else is working properly and that I don’t have a crooked spine and my lungs sound ok. I also will go back to the hospital as they want to do an ultrasound and I have to get some blood test results. The week after next, I go back to my obstetrician.
The overwhelming impression I get is that they are extremely thorough here. Which is a change from Ireland where I was only given the briefest of probings at all my appointments. Brief probings make me think about cavalier attitudes. In Ireland stuff is taken for granted. You are healthy if you aren’t complaining about something. Here, you may be unhealthy until we take some bloods and examine you thoroughly to confirm otherwise. Most importantly, it is all covered under standard health insurance. The hospital, the endocrine specialist and the obstetrician won’t cost anything. It will be very interesting to be part of the Austrian system over the next few years. My mutter kind pass isn’t just about me, there are numerous checkup milestones waiting to be filled out when the baby arrives.
I’ve heard a lot of people complain about the Irish health service and I’ve been part of it myself. I didn’t feel that I was neglected in any way, but there were certain things that I could only get done privately. Some private referrals came with a waiting list of several weeks. Here, appointment referrals take only a few days. It is an eye opener to be exposed to another system. One thing that takes a bit of adjustment is the different attitude and the matter of fact approach to things. I am impressed so far with the system. That said, I am also lonely for the friendly Irish midwives (the ones here are quite stern) who dealt with me before I came here. But I’m not lonely for a system that missed something significant in pregnancy that was only discovered as part of tests ordered for the medical necessary before coming on assignment here…… Wouldn’t you know, those tests were ordered by another medical system too. A Swedish one. I’m spotting a pattern.
I don’t want to hop on the diss the Irish medical system bandwagon, but in all seriousness the attitude of Irish medical professionals and the HSE that everything is fine unless someone is complaining about something specific needs to change. Prevention is surely better (and cheaper) than the cure. Screening is cheaper than pallative treatment when there may not be any real hope as stuff wasn’t caught early enough. I’m an expatriate pain in the ass already. Two appointments in, I can see the shortcomings of the system at home. Shortcomings caused by taking stuff for granted instead of taking some blood and ordering extra tests. Shortcomings caused by unbelievably long waiting lists which may in turn be caused by too few specialists. Specialists seem as common as muck here. I am going to have several doctors, each a specialist in their own field. Can you imagine that in Ireland? And all for free? Well, not all for free, but all because you made social insurance contributions.
The moving company is coming tomorrow. So today is a frantic rush to pile everything into “move to new country” and “put into storage” bundles. After nearly four years living in our current abode, I’m excited about the prospect of an empty house with all our belongings en route to our new life or in storage. Not that empty houses don’t come with their own list of chores. Empty houses need cleaning and then painting to make them ready for renting. Which brings me to the subject of tenants. I am familiar with the state some tenants leave properties in after they move out having had to help clean up after them and it never ceases to amaze me how people can rent a property and move into its pristine, freshly painted niceness and move out leaving filthy kitchens, bathrooms, wardrobes etc. It is so ignorant, I also think, these people have no shame, as I have never done anything other than scrub every wardrobe, kitchen surface and bathroom surface and left it squeaky clean when I have moved out of rented accomodation. The reason why – I wouldn’t want anyone to think of me as a filthy pig. A “rateyourtenant” website would be an excellent idea. Most landlords have their tenants RSI numbers and names, which would make it very easy to create a “rateyourtenant” website so you can post references of tenants and check RSI numbers for filty pig ratings. SK and I are hoping to find tenants of our ilk for the property we are vacating. i.e. ones who won’t trash the place and ones who will clean up their filth when they leave. That said, neither of us forsee coming back to live here, it is just two steppy a property for a small baby or toddler. But, it’s a great property for a couple or a family with slightly older children. With unbelievably low heating bills.
