The Metro.

Every huge urban city center has a metro and it seems that every metro has its own personality.

London seems to think that if you’re not reading a book or newspaper on the morning train to work you are clearly inefficient and unintelligent. Result being: everyone is reading something on the metro. I imagine some people might have Harry Potter books hidden behind their papers.

Moscow prefers to test your balancing skills. Don’t you dare hold on to anything. Wearing heels? Even more of a reason to stand. If you so much as accidentally bump into the person next to you because goodness knows the train might jerk suddenly, you may have just broken a law. Or at the very least, you can now consider yourself as having lost the invisible competition.

Paris has decided to institute the opposite-of-the-staring-contest for its particularity. Making eye-contact? A much worse offense than losing a staring game. You might be sitting two inches from the guy across from you, but as far as he’s concerned, you might as well be on the other side of the earth.

However, you are bound to run into some interesting people and some even more interesting incidents on late night metro rides or even during the regular day, so here are several observations…

• A very dignified middle-aged man, briefcase and all, eating gummibears while reading Le Monde. I imagine he has ties to Germany. (line 1)
• The metro stops and a homeless man randomly bolts, opens the door and kindly ushers in a blind man who couldn’t get onto the train because nobody was there to open the door. (line 7)
• A woman specifically found me in the crowd of metro-riders to thank me for holding the metro door open for her five minutes before. (line 8)
• Two punk teenage girls making out intensely, two fashionably dressed twenty-something-year-olds egging them on, and two guys dressed in Renaissance garb with fake puss-filled bubonic plague moles drinking beer, as would be expected. (line 10)