By 8:05 am On Wednesday mornings, I am waiting for the 8:12 on Voie 2. Energy saving lamps light the platform and lend a glow to the haziness that comes partially from the dewy morning air, and partially from cigarette smoke of the cold, hunched over masses. This one day a week is the earliest that I’ve ever ever had to be at work, in my entire career - 9:00am, and I’m typically grumpy about it until I’ve had my coffee, played with Max, handed him off to my father-in-law, with whom we stay one night a week for childcare convenience. I speed walk the 7 minutes to the station in the dark, brisk morning, gloved hands thrust into pockets, sometimes trying to exhale rings when I breathe out in the cold; it’s the ‘cool’ without the cancer.
Off the RER and into the cattle round up about 20 minutes later, I shuffle behind, accelerate ahead of people, and dodge the thick crowd until I find myself stagnant in a bottleneck at the top of the stairs. We’re all headed for the same metro line, the whole world, and we’ll all attempt to get onto the same car. And today, I did get in. Once there, with my toes curled under hoping that I wouldn’t be mortified by the door repeatedly trying to close around my shoulders or my feet. You know, the jerk who refuses to get off, but systematically stuffs fellows passengers into this sleeve of a train, one stomach inhalation at a time. Luckily, no such thing happened. The door slid closed in front of me, brushing the front of my coat. I rode the 5 stops, eyeball to eyeball with myself, staring at my reflection in the window of the door.
I’d heard about crowded-crowded public transportation, and have seen horrible YouTube videos of what happens to those people, but I’ve managed to largely avoid buses and trains in my adult years. It’s difficult to get around most of the San Francisco bay area without a car if you don’t live in the vicinity if of work, and I never did, driving over an hour in each direction sometimes, from San Francisco to San Jose in the hey-days of dotcoms. Oddly enough, my commute later from the new apartment in Palo Alto was almost just as long. My last job, though, which was only 5 freeway exits away from my last apartment in San Francisco- the bay area dream commute - was nearly impossible to get to by public transportation, as it was built out of the way, on the bay. I say nearly because the 15 minute drive would have been a 1.5 hour journey to get to the bus stop, ride the bus, catch the shuttle that stops at the several corporations in the area, and walk to work from the parking lot. What I’m saying is that I drove everywhere, because public transportation, going anywhere, was a minimum of an hour long journey with some crazy winos and several line changes.
Back in Paris, doing the in the morning-metro-shuffle with my fellow non-outwardly, crazy paper pushers, and keyboard jockeys, I imagined that I was looking down upon myself, much like Big Brother would, chuckling at this army of foot soldiers heeding the alarm clock at around the same time, going through similar morning rituals, pecking loved ones good bye, see ya later, and marching on ward for the metro station. In Paris, it doesn’t make sense not to take public transportation because it runs so frequently and to all nooks and crannies of the city. For all the Parisian world on the metro, I can’t figure out how there are still so many drivers wreaking havoc on Paris’ streets - not driving in their lanes, heeding pedestrians, or using their turn signals - confusing traffic round-the-clock, and successfully stopping flow, most of the time as they create gridlock in the middle of almost every street. Must be the bridge and tunnel crew.
