A week in Birmingham

Over the last few years, one of the bits of difficulty that we’ve had as a family is figuring out exactly what sort of holiday we like to have.

We’ve been to the seaside.

We’ve done the woods.

We’ve visited with family.

We’ve done short city breaks.

There was even that time during the pandemic. We were living in Poland but we had left our flat. I had finished up working with the church we had tried¹ to help there. There wasn’t any more or for me to do besides a bit of support raising and applying for my visa. I had my interview with Cornhill Scotland during that time as well.

For about six weeks, we were technically homeless. We didn’t have a fixed address, we lived in AirBnBs. Looking back on it now, we see it as an extended holiday on the Continent. During that time we spent our days going to the park, trying to stay cool in the 30C heat, and counting down the days to when we would be flying back to the UK.

But we felt isolated during that time as well. Besides the church we didn’t know anybody in the city and we were just waiting.

Four years on from that time, we have now settled into the west of Scotland and it feels like home. We’ve lived here longer than we did in my previous post and the thought of leaving would be very difficult.

But these last two years have also been a bit of a disaster when it comes to our family taking time to get away. A variety a factors² have led to us not having very good times away as a family.

We weren’t sure if we’d actually get time away this summer because of workload but then some friends of ours reached out and mentioned that they had friends who would be away over the summer and would we like to house-sit for them and get some time in a different city. A free place to stay for a week near friends doesn’t come up very often so we had to take it.

Over the course of a few days, we got to have something we’ve been missing in our current context: time to hang out with friends while the kids went off and played. At the moment, we don’t have anyone in our church who is in the same stage of life as us. We’ve started to make some connections in the town but these are slow growing and need careful nurturing.

But our friends in Birmingham understand some very significant things that we are going through. They suffer from visa trauma³, they’re a missionary family, and they found their way here in much the same way that we did. To do ministry.

They showed us around the city and it was exactly what we needed. We visited the Think Tank museum, sat in on the communion service at St. Martin’s in the Bullring, explored Moseley Bog, wandered around a massive shopping mall⁴. We drank bubble tea and ate curry and had lots of conversations about everything.

And what we have decided is that we need to try and make this a yearly thing: a trip specifically to go see friends and do stuff with them.

But what about the city itself?

People have been surprised when we said we were going to Birmingham for a holiday. It’s a city with a reputation. Those outside of it hate the accent.

We found the city to be a place where we don’t look out of place. A mixed race, international family is sort of the norm in Birmingham. We felt normal. Part of what we found so nice about the trip was just that: feeling like our family was normal.

And even the suburbs where we stayed felt like the perfect place to rest after a day in the city centre. Cotteridge Park in Bournville has a community cafe run by the nicest people. Attic Brew Co. has some of the most creative beers I have ever tried; their rhubarb & custard sour is a revelation.

Something that we found remarkable was the way that the city reminded us of that summer in Warsaw. During that summer, we stayed in Śródmieście and Czyste and Mirów. We were surrounded by embassies and skyscrapers. For whatever reason, being amongst the skyscrapers and seeing city bikes and electric scooters everywhere brought us all right back to that summer except nobody had to open Google Translate.

It was just the right getaway for us.