#2: Underground, London and Paris

The Tube doors opened quietly, their swish accompanied by the usual reminder to mind the gap. As my parents and I stepped off, a second train rattled past, briefly raising my hair with its wind. The silence on the train swiftly became a low hum of sound as we joined the crowd on the platform. I had forgotten just how huge the King’s Cross/St. Pancras Tube station was. Six different Tube lines converged here, underneath two of London’s major railway stations. The rabbit warren of tunnels seemed to twist endlessly into the earth.

Mind the gap!

Appropriately, all kinds of people bustled through the rabbit warren. A bewildered-looking group of tourists consulted a wall map and argued in French, as a second group searched frantically for a Tube worker. Meanwhile, the rest of London swarmed past, apparently having memorized the entire Tube map. Students going home from school, nannies pushing sleeping babies, and neatly dressed men and women returning from work zipped around in every direction. Just around the turn in the tunnel, I heard a violin playing and the chink of coins falling into a case.

Bastille station, Paris

            Four days later, I scrambled onto another underground train. The Paris metro, like London’s Tube, seemed to cart people of every imaginable description across the city. Students, construction workers, and tourists elbowed their way into cars, the rattling of the trains and softly spoken French providing sonic background. I watched the stations zoom past, mentally pronouncing the names as best I could. Music even echoed from the twisting tunnels, just as it did in London. Entering the Louvre station, a merry jazz tune on a saxophone echoed up from the depths (check out all these sounds in the video below).

The older Tube stations, like Baker Street, are quite stunning.

            Every time I set foot in the Tube or the metro, I was always amazed at the variety of people. In cities where it’s difficult to own a car, the subway becomes the street. It is the place where everyone, no matter who they are or where they come from, shares the same goal: getting somewhere. For this reason, if I were looking for good cross-section of humanity, I would need to look no further than a subway system.