A few weeks ago, I put aside my prejudices and worries and decided to spend a glorious day on a bus trip to the "unreachable" mall. I left at 2:00pm and in order to optimise the potential number of busses to catch and minimise the potential waiting time, I first biked to the bus depot in central Morgantown. According to the schedule, I should have a bus every half our there and since I arrived at 2:20pm, there should be one within 10 minutes. As it turned out, I missed one while figuring out the schedules - the 2pm bus had left 25 minutes late.
In itself that wasn't too bad. While the bus stop itself turns out to be the local dope and smoke market (never before have I witnessed two total strangers talk about cocaine addiction within 5 minutes of introducing themselves), the weather was pleasant enough, as was the nearby trail (which I keep coming back to) and the scenery on the other side of the bus station. (The picture above should bring out the early April cherry blossoms, at least that's what I think they are. That lovely spring weather has by now been replaced by heat not unworthy of Melbourne Cup day.)
After 35 minutes at the bus stop, a 25-minute delayed bus did arrive and (after having stopped for an extra 5 minutes) brought us to the mall. While I had been gone from home for an entire hour now, the busride itself only took 15 minutes. Talking about efficiency.
There are three malls in Morgantown (though "around" would be a more accurate preposition). The first mall is immediately south of the city and has died ever since Wall Mart moved out. Now the only reason to go there is because the social security administration has its office there, so you're effectively obliged to go at least once, at the very start of your stay. The second one is right across the river from where I live and the final one is where I was headed now. None of these three malls have sidewalks. None of these three are reachable by bike unless you have no sense of selfpreservation whatsoever. A bus ride to mall 2 (as we just found out) takes 15 minutes, waiting not included. A ride to mall 3 takes at least half an hour - according to the schedules, that is.
Because there are rather few stores inside town, I presume my hopes were artificially inflated for what I would find at the mall. Upon arrival, though, I was quickly put in my place. The fear of losing my way in the seven full, three half and twenty quarter floors of which any Australian shopping mall seems to be built up (in quite a few Australian shopping centres I've seen, the word "floor" doesn't make much sense: you really need a continuous scale in z-direction or an altimeter to keep track of where you are), quickly evaporated when I realised this mall wasn't much larger than the little misfit we have in Kapellen (my town in Belgium). In fact, this mall didn't even have a supermarket and therefore became even less interesting than that one.
I feel like I have to qualify my disappointment, though. The fact is that the third mall (the one across the water from me) does actually contain some interesting stores, though it only has a single bus going there, which translates into an hourly instead of half-hourly service. I got a ride there twice now and it does provide you with good shops for at least some things. The problem is, of course, getting there.
Also, as much as I may seem to complain, I really should bear in mind that Morgantown isn't the metropolis I've lived in for the past ~4 years. According to Wikipedia it has less than 30,000 inhabitants so Melbourne is literally more than a hundred times bigger. The reason why a big city like Melbourne has all its shops in the centre while tiny Morgantown has them all a 15-minute drive outside town, remains a mystery to me, though.
So, after a five-minute stroll through what I expected to be a plethora of assaults on my common sense and - more so - wallet, I'd seen it all and strolled back to the parking lot with an empty feeling and without spending a single cent. It was 3:20pm by now - I had been gone for 80 minutes and had spent a total of 5 minutes in the mall. I figured I could walk back in, maybe eat something, but the 3pm bus (which should normally arrive here by 3:15pm but was delayed by an undetermined amount of time) could arrive any minute and missing that bus would imply an extra wait of at least 30 minutes. I figured the risk of missing the bus was too large and opted to play safe and inspect the parking lot instead.
Here you have a snapshot of the parking lot. It doesn't seem to be so huge, but that is because it encircles the bean-shaped mall and therefore doesn't need a huge radius to have a surface at least twice as large as the shopping area. Smart design in that sense: it allows the fast-food eating, never-walking homo sapiens (who think of a motor cycle rather than a bicycle upon hearing the word "bike") to limit its physical activity to an absolute minimum. (And then they wonder why the dysfunctional health care absorbs a third of US taxes.) Let's move on to somehing more positive and focus on the horizon in the picture above: the softly undulating foothills of the Appalachian mountains, specked with nice white houses that undoubtedly have lovely views over the natural beauty of which this Mountain State has so much. When/if I get to the even more sparsely populated region of Green Bank, you can expect some clearer evidence, because I'm aware this picture may not cut it in itself.
The bus did arrive, eventually. If I remember correctly, it arrived at 4pm and must therefore have been close to 40 to 45 minutes late. I would ask how it's possible to get such a delay on a lazy Sunday afternoon, but given that this post comes almost a month after the event, I don't feel justified in pressing that point. Getting back to the bus stop at 4:20pm, I made it home around 4:40pm, bringing the trip total close to three hours for a 5-minute walk through the mall. Luckily these durations don't scale linearly...
In Australia, the one thing that bothered me most, was the heat. Yet, when you sign up for a couple of years down under, you really should realise it's going to be hot so complaining about it isn't really justified. In America, the single most annoying thing (in my opinion) is the absence of sidewalks and the consequential necessity of a car. This, too, is an implicit part of the deal and it would therefore be unfair if I kept focussing on that point: I knew this was going to be an issue and I've had three months to get used to it, so it really is time for me to get over it and stop whinging - unless I want to end up a pom in America (which, given my accent, I'm not too far off.) I therefore decided this will be the very last post where I'll complain about sidewalks, public transport and necessity of cars. I rest my case, the rant is over.
Before I do so, though, let me humour myself by posting one more picture from my way to the supermarket. It shows one of the few crossings across a fairly busy two-lane road (I've waited quite a while to be able to take this pictures without any cars obstructing the view). You can see the crossing on the left hand side. It leads to ~5 metres of sidewalk which... vanish into nothingness. The sidewalk isn't continued along the major road and on the sidestreet there's not even an even stretch of grass to take refuge on (the left-hand side of the side street - though not necessarily obvious from this picture - is pretty much identical to the right-hand side, which you can just make out.)
With that and apologies for the long delay in getting this post out, I'll leave you all.
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