El Metro

Ah, the metro. We have such a love/hate relationship. Well, not love. It's more of a toleration/hate relationship. The metro is definitely the quickest way to go somewhere 5+ kilometers away, which is really good (when you accidentally overslept and your class starts in less than an hour). It's also dirt cheap. For 3 pesos, or roughly 25 cents, you can enter the station and make unlimited transfers. They have these handy little prepaid cards that you just scan and enter. (I'm guessing they have these in every single subway system around the world, but as I have never taken a subway before arriving in D.F., to me these cards are magic.

My magic card!

So, step inside on of the D.F. metro stations.Take a deep breath in. No, wait, bad decision. Cough that out. Try not to breathe too deeply--the metro station smells like a mix of the 12 million people it serves daily, overheated machines, cheap cleaning products, and fast food. (Keep in mind that it's very hot in the metro stations--so those 12 million people? They're all sweating. Ewwwwww...)

If you listen hard enough, you can probably hear the DF metro from Iowa. It is so noisy! People chatting. Screeching trains. Vendors yelling advertisements for their products (both in the stations and on the train cars). They sell anything and everything: food and drinks, magazines and newspapers, toys for children, phone chargers and headphones, cleaning products, beauty and health products, even drain stoppers. The thing I absolutely despise is how the music vendors advertise their product. They hop on the subway car with speaker-backpacks, and blast terrible music at deafening volumes. Right among all the people, who are trapped in the car until the next stop. The live music performers, on the other hand, (well, some are still awful and probably tone-deaf), some are quite talented. I'm thinking of the man who plays the fiddle in the Tacubaya station, or the group of young men and women who play wooden drums in the cars that travel along the blue line, or the occasional talented singer/guitarist who hops on the train car. All looking for money, but all practicing an art (and they usually aren't pushy about asking for money). My favorite noise-makers are the live performers :) Except the tone deaf ones. They seem to think that the louder they sing, the better they get. Yikes!

My "home station," Patriotismo, is luckily one of the least busy stations in the city!

The picture above is of my "home station" which is almost never busy, but step into a station like Tacubaya, Chilpancingo, Auditorio, or Polanco and you really start to understand the quantity of people here. 21 million people live in this city, and the metro is the most popular mode of transportation. You see all types of people, all ages, all sizes, all attitudes. The grumpiest people to the sweetest people, the needy and those well-off. Lots of police, in theory to keep everything running smoothly. One thing I do genuinely like about subway culture is that chivalry is not dead. People immediately give up their seat to a pregnant woman, a woman carrying a baby, an elderly person, a handicapped person, or an injured person. Men give their seats to women. Even in the busiest, most crowded, and hottest metro lines, kindness lives on. It almost makes up for the times when the subway is so crowded that the outside people start pushing and cramming everybody together in the car like sardines. Almost.

The metro is hot, sticky, noisy, grubby, smelly, and crowded. But, it's cheap, really convenient, and somehow entertaining. With a little hand sanitizer, the metro is...tolerable.