Subways

I remember the first time I took the subway by myself.  I was nineteen and the subway in question was the Paris métro (you never forget your first love).

I'd taken the métro many times before, but always with my parents.  It was, as previously mentioned, the first subway line I'd ever been on.  When I was eleven, my family and I used it to transfer from the Gare du Nord to the Gare de Lyon, a transfer pattern that I would later learn by heart.  When I was twelve, my father's glasses fell off as we were trying to pull our luggage off at a station and in a Herculean feat, I dragged all the bags off as he scrambled for his glasses and leapt off after me.  When I was fourteen and on a two-week cultural exchange program, our group leader asked me to plan a route for the rest of the group from the Louvre to the Eiffel Tower. 

But as far as I can remember, I'd never taken it by myself.  On this occasion, my parents were living in Paris.  I had just gotten back from a three-month program in Crete, and in a month I would embark on a six-month backpacking trip with a friend from high school.  I was out with my mother and sister and had gotten bored on a shopping trip that had led us to the Champs-Elysée, and so I told them that I would meet them back at our apartment in Belleville by 5:00 p.m.

I didn't do much with this, my first taste of freedom in Paris.  I went into the Virgin megastore.  I used their machines to listen to a couple of albums that had come out while I was in Greece, I wandered around their book section, and then I took the métro home.

I remember taking the escalator down into the métro.  A frisson of anxiety briefly overtook me; here I was, taking public transportation by myself!  For a girl from semi-rural Ohio, it was a little nerve-wracking.

But the métro worked as it always did.  I put my green ticket into the machine (strip-side down) and the machine spat it out at the other end.  The air smelled métro-normal, an indescribable public-transportation-y smell that I've really only ever noticed in Paris; I know there are those who hate that smell, but I've always loved it.  To me, it means that I'm in Paris.

I followed the color-coordinated sign down to the platform, the sound of the buskers floating with me through the hallways.  I hopped on the train, and changed at the Hôtel de Ville to line 11.  I watched the stops whir by:  Rambuteau - Arts et Métiers - République - Goncourt - Belleville, and my stop, Pyréneés.  (Tonight I had to look those up, but there was a time I had the line 11 stops memorized.)

The whole time, I looked at the people around me.  In the year 2000, there were 67 different ethnicities living in Belleville and to watch the demographics of the train change from the line 1 to line 11, from the Champs-Elysées to Pyrénées, was an education in the rhythms of a city.  And -- most startlingly -- no one looked askance at me!

This is an amazing thing for an American in Paris, and despite the fact that my French is solidly serviceable I am apparently the most American-looking American that you get in Paris.  Even if I walk into a French restaurant in a completely non-touristy area, I am addressed in English before I can even get a word of French out.

Taking the métro by myself was different to any other Paris experience.  For the first time, inexplicably, I felt that I belonged in Paris.  I walked briskly, made my transfer with ease, and boarded my trains without hestitation.  I forced myself to act confidently, and by doing so I became confident. No one rolled their eyes at me or stared or muttered under their breath about the stupid American (and yeah, French people, I love you but you have to know that I can understand you when you do that).

Don't get me wrong; there are so many things I love about the Paris métro that if I really went into it here, I would be writing all night.  The music, the posters, the efficiency, the signage, the way you can really get anywhere in the city limits in 45 minutes or less, the way there's always a stop within a fifteen-minute walk.  But what I really remember about that first ride is that it is the first time that I really felt like I belonged in a big city.  And somehow, to my nineteen year-old self, that translated to feeling like an adult.  If I could handle myself in Paris, my lizard brain reasoned, I could certainly handle taking a full load of college courses and living over five hundred miles away from my parents and feeding myself healthy things.  (Two out of three ain't bad.)

I'm thinking about this right now because today, I took the Beijing subway by myself for the first time.  Again, it's not the first time I've taken the Beijing subway, although I'm definitely not as familiar with it as I was with the métro when I took my first solo journey; a colleague took pity on my inability to shuffle myself around the city and took me and another coworker on an incredibly kind teach-Rebecca-how-to-use-public-transportation-and-also-get-her-to-eat-a-fried-scorpion tour last week (more on that in a later post, probably).

But today, by myself, I took the subway from inside the second ring road all the way out to where I live in the suburbs.  I changed trains three times and when I arrived at my final train station, I took the bus the rest of the way to the apartment compound.  On some of the trains I could sit; on some I stood comfortably; and on one I squished myself in and barely avoided being clipped by the doors when they closed.

The Beijing subway has some obvious differences from the métro.  For one thing, no buskers (immense sadface here).  For another, the floors of the hallways are so slippery-shiny that the urge to slide down them on the long transfers occasionally proved a little too tempting (I stopped quickly, though, because I realized that I would probably end up with a broken neck and I still have no idea how my health insurance works).  And as the only white face in a train full of Chinese faces, there is probably no way that the other Beijingers on the train are going to assume I'm Chinese, even if I don't open my mouth. (A non-sequiturial side note to the people who say that all Chinese people look alike:  you are dead wrong, and shut up.)

Still -- I felt the same sense of belonging here as I did on the métro.  Unlike when I was in Paris, I couldn't understand what people were saying around me (I have GOT to learn more Mandarin, and soon), but neither did people stare at me.  A grandmotherly woman and I made friendly eye contact as we smiled at the antics of a baby on a particularly crowded train.  A teenage boy gave me his seat.  A man let me through as I exited the train, and I thanked him clumsily.  In short, everything that usually happens on a subway happens (except the boy giving me his seat -- that one scares me a little).

It took me four trains, a bus, and a short walk to get home today and I had the beginnings of a migraine by the end of it all, but still:  I feel free.  If I can do this, I reason, then I can certainly teach a full load of classes, live in an apartment by myself in a foreign city, and feed myself healthy food. 

Well, the first two, anyway.