World Tour: Public Transport Style

I have seen the world, I've seen it wonders....but there's no place like underground public transportation. (Fifty points to the first person who can name that pop-culture reference. The race starts....now!)

I have an extremely boring life and nothing really worth blogging about. I checked my friends' blogs for inspiration but all I found were pictures of their smiling/crying/vacantly-expressing offspring and that just got me depressed. But, because I have taken on a more nomadic lifestyle for my early-20's, I have gotten to see a heck ton of the world while everyone else is disposing of putrid diapers and cleaning dribble off chins....who's the one who hasn't accomplished anything with his life NOW, huh???

So in my efforts to reflect on a once eventful life and also to unintentionally rub in the fact that I'm more well-traveled than you, I will now proceed to give you my assessment and impressions of every single underground (call it metro, subway, tube, t, whateva) public transport system that has ever had the honor of having me as a passenger.

In chronological order.............

1) Paris (2001, 2007)

The Paris metro is mostly great...tons of different lines, clean platforms, vending machines, magazine stands, monitors that say when the next train will arrive (which is sometimes 7-10 minutes...way too long for someone accustomed to the Commie-inspired metros of Russia). The absolute best part of the Parisian metro though are the recorded voices that announce the name of the next stop. They're very...French. So with ridiculous accents and more ridiculous intonations, the "metro voices" became the subject of much ridicule and parody among my friends in the music program I was participating in there during summer 07. "Eur-OPE! (drastic rise in intonation) EUR-ope. (drastic fall in intonation)" has never ceased to bring a smile to my face.

P.S. Watch out if you're wearing a backpack in the Paris metro. Not because of pickpockets though...you'll probably get trapped in the clear, plastic gates that open up when you submit your fare. It happens to the best of us.

2) St. Petersburg, Russia (2003-2005, 2007, 2008)

The St. Pete metro feels like home to me...(But just feels like home...it's probably a literal home for plenty of street children and homeless people in the city.) It's the only metro system I've ever used where they still give you metal tokens for your fare. This past summer I looked at a metro map and I think that I have now used every single station on the St. Pete metro with the exception of Kirovskiy Zavod and some new one at the top of the blue line. I am also proud to say that I am one of the few people I know of who has never had anything stolen from them while riding the metro in St. Pete. Go me.

The St. Pete metro has also acted as a reflection of the rising expense of living in the city over the past five years. When I first arrived in St. Petersburg in Dec. 03, one ride on the metro cost 7 rubles (about a quarter). At the new year, the price was raised to 8 rubles. I remember the lines of people trying to buy and hoard as many tokens as they could before the price raise--it was quite a big deal. The next year the price was raised to ten rubles and that's the price it was when I left in 05. When I went back to St. Petersburg in summer 07 the price had jumped to 14 rubles (!) and when I went back this past summer it was 17 rubles (!!). That's about a 150% price increase in five short years!! Inconceivable. However, the St. Pete metro is amazingly efficient--you never have to wait usually more than two minutes for a train (thank you communism) and most of the metro stations are basically museums in and of themselves (thank you communism). I always carry around my plastic monthly transport pass from the st. pete metro as a memento.

Don't even get me started on the escalators...

3) London (2005)

Finally I began to understand what all those "Mind the Gap" t-shirts were all about...I thought they were trying to raise awareness of a certain retail chain.

4) Washington, D.C. (2007, 2008)

I remember being annoyed that the fare you had to pay was determined on how far you were traveling on the subway. That's the only place I've been that was so specific about fares...snobs.

5) New York City (2007, 2008)

Blast to the past. Whenever I'm on the NYC subway I always feel like I'm back in 1987. I blame it on the fonts on the station signs. I guess they're iconic though so they probably won't change.

Oh, and it was a great moment of epiphany for me when after all these years I finally figured out what the "A Train" was.

6) Moscow, Russia (2007, 2008)

Answer-A huge, ginormous, massive system of interweaving trains that's always full of tons and tons and tons of people that acts overall as a reflection of this huge, ginormous, massive city. Question--What is the Moscow metro? (I still haven't lost sight of my dream of being on Jeopardy.)

I remember being really weirded out the first time I rode the metro in Moscow because I was so used to riding the metro in St. Pete that it was just strange to ride on another metro in Russia full of unfamiliar station names, etc. But I got over myself.

P.S. as of summer 08, it was 19 rubles to ride the Moscow metro. That's up 2 rubles from summer 07.

7) Boston (2008)

The "T". Rode on it just twice going to and from NEC...the whole time I was riding on the train I was thinking, "Had I chosen to come live here I would probably be riding the T every single day...but I chose Iowa." Now I ride the Iowa City Transit bus every day and wouldn't want it any different!

8) Berlin (2008)

One of the few criminal acts of my otherwise flawless life. All I wanted to do was go from a certain train station (not the hauptbahnhohf...a different one) in Berlin (where I had just arrived from Chemnitz) to the Berlin Tegel airport for my flight to Rome. So from the train station I started following the signs that would lead me to the metro and then all of a sudden I was standing on the platform and a train was arriving. I looked around for some sort of ticket booth to buy my fare but there was none to be found. So when the train pulled up in front of me and the doors opened, I just got on. I only had to go four stops before getting off to get on the airport shuttle so when I got to that stop, I stepped out onto the platform, walked up the stairs, and was out in the open. To this day, I have no idea how to purchase a ticket for the Berlin metro.

9) Naples, Italy (2008)

My one ride on the smelly Naples metro came after being in the city for a week and never having previously taken advantage of the city's metro system. It was a lot less crowded than the buses were and after riding on the metro there I could only say to myself, "Good work genius. You could have been doing that all week long." But because I did spend my whole week walking around the streets of smelly Naples, I got to see a city on the verge of constant anarchy in all its glory. Sore feet was a very small price to pay.

10) Tunis, Tunisia (2008)

I should sue Tunisia for false advertising. I found the "metro" in Tunis and it turned out to not be more than a glorified tram. It was super crowded and everyone was looking at me because obviously I was a tourist. (I thought my bandana, super awesome tan, and overall rugged look would fool them, but I was wrong.) The tram did go underground for a little bit though, so to my great relief I was able to have an underground experience in Africa...this almost made up for the despair I felt when I found out after I arrived that there was no McDonalds in all of Tunisia. In my bitter, bitter mindset caused by that (and the fact that Tunisians don't use toilet paper), I realized that I had no idea how many stops I had gone and had no idea where I was on the line. The train was too ghetto to have any voice announcing the stops and none of the platforms had any signs indicating what the name of the stop was. By some miracle, I just randomly picked a stop to get out of the train and it happened to be the one I was looking for. Go me.

Thanks for reading. I know you all feel enlightened now and are probably thinking, "Wow, Dan really has such an amazing life." Go me.