Underground Lessons

Being new somewhere, I feel like a little kid. Everything catches my attention. Everything is unexpected. I'm constantly trying to orient myself. Where am I? Where am I going? How do I get there? Every tube station is a new adventure.

I started out with the notion that the subway system in London is great. You can get anywhere. Plus there are great maps at the station exits and on street poles all over London that show you the neighborhood. But I'm also noticing that we're doing a lot of walking underground.

Some of the stations are shiny new.  And the escalators work.


But lots of them are shabby.  You walk through narrow tunnels way underground.

We basically follow the crowd up and down stairs, around corners, hoping that next train platform isn't too far away.











Down the stairs.





















Then up the next set.

People with disabilities haven't got a chance here.  Fortunately, J's foot bone break is minor and the doctor said she could use it.  But we tend to go a little slower than normal which is fine. 

At Russell Square, you have to take an elevator to get up.  There are emergency stairs.  It says there are 175 steps and not to use them unless it's an emergency.  The first night, after what seemed like a long wait, but probably wasn't, we followed two other people up the stairs.  175 stairs is a long way.  The Juneau practice on the hills and steps was great preparation.

So last night we waited and took the elevator.

Besides being written overhead, the words echo over the speaker.  "Stand Clear - Doors Closing."  And the Italian tourists near us copied the crisp British pronunciation as if they were repeating after the teacher and smiled in recognition of the words.


J did that in Berlin as M taught her "Aussteigen links"  "Bleiben zuruck."  Which gets us back to the beginning of this post.  When one is in a totally new environment everything seems new and one's brain is open and working.

I began questioning why we were spending so much time walking around like rodents in holes in the ground.  This seems so bizarre.  But I'm sure Londoners never think that.  They just take it for granted.  That's how they get around.  And if I stayed here three months or more, I'd stop thinking and just do.

And because the trains don't take you directly where you want to go, you go much further by train than you would as the mole runs.  (Probably moles don't run as straight as crows fly.)  I was starting to get the hang of figuring out which bus to take.  They really are well marked on the bus stops.  And you can see the neighborhoods in a bus.  But  might well be stuck in traffic, which gets people back underground.  But on this three day bank holiday weekend, the Jubilee line is closed, so you have to go back up and catch a replacement bus.

Tonight, we needed to go from Marble Arch (on that single red horizontal line in the middle on the left below Bond Street - left of the perpendicular gray line) four stops along the red line to the right to Holborn and then changing (doing all that scurrying through gerbil mazes) to the blue line and going up one stop to Russell Square.   That seems a ways, but how long would it take to walk? Fortunately, we also have a street map.

Oxford Street goes horizontally just below the middle.  Marble Arch is just above that green park area on the far left.  Sorry I cut it off a bit.  That is also where Hyde Park Speakers' Corner is.  More on that later.  Just above Oxford from the left to the right is Seymour, which becomes Wigmore which becomes Cavendish which becomes Mortimore which becomes Goodge as it dead ends where there is a big pink area (the University of London on top and the British Museum below) and the green rectangle is Russell Square.  So we walked instead and it only took about 40 minutes.

But we're convinced that the walking involved in catching buses and subways is one reason we saw far fewer overweight Germans and now British people than we see Americans.  They are forced to move around more.