Please Mind the Gap

I've been writing a lot about different activities and trips I've been taking, but not too much about London life itself. There are a lot of strange and funny things that happen or stuff I learn about the Brits that's interesting, but I never remember it to put in the blog. So for now, I'll tell you about riding the Tube.

I've been taking the Tube to and from work every day. I live in South Kensington, a nice, ritzy-ish area, and I work at Oxford Circus, where there are a ton of shops (I stopped at Topshop on the way home today -- yay!). The stations are clean and much nicer than the the NYC subway (and much, much nicer than the T in Boston). There are signs on most platforms that update with how far away the next train is and plenty of escalators. You have to tap your Oyster card (Or that's what I use -- I guess you can have single-ride passes, but I have a student Oyster card for discounts. It always makes me think of Oyster crackers) on the way in and again on the way out, and money is deducted depending on how far you travel. I guess this seems like a good idea, but I end up spending about four quid (that's like saying "bucks") a day to get to work with my discount. That's almost $6.

Along the escalators there are usually tons of ads, many for various shows being put on. This is how I found out about The Taming of the Shrew, and also Spring Awakening, which I think I'm getting tickets to. The walkways to the platforms are all pretty clean and everything's pretty easy to figure out. The lines all have names (not colors, like Boston, or numbers/letters, like New York), so I ride the Piccadilly line from Gloucester Road and change to the Victoria line at Green Park. On the way there (I think... or maybe it's the way back) I go in the direction of Cockfosters, which makes me giggle on the inside like a 13-year-old boy every time I hear it.

Something funny I've noticed since I started working is that during rush hour, everyone on the Tube is reading the newspaper. Like, actually everyone. I looked down the car I was in on the way home today, and on my left in the row of seats closest to me there was one person without a paper, and on my right there were two. (By the way, the seats are all nice, clean and fabric-wrapped.) They're not exactly reading the London Times, though. They're all reading tabloids. Now, technically the Times is a tabloid now, if you're going by the shape of the paper (the other way is a broadsheet), but I'm talking about actual tabs. Like Metro, City AM, and London Lite. They're like the Post, but trashier. For example, half of today's cover was taken up by a picture of Britney Spears, who started her Circus tour in New Orleans last night (and I'm not going to get to see her and I'm really sad about it!). So, OK, this is fine, but you expect the readers to be a bunch of 20-something females. Nope. Half of them were middle-aged men. But these papers are just handed out on the street and people grab them for their commute. The thing is, when I worked in the city this summer, people kept trying to shove AM New York and Metro in my hands, too, but I didn't see 45-year-old men huddled up, learning about Madonna's divorce.

There are also some funny signs that I wish I had pictures of... I'll have to remember to take some before I leave. These are posted by TfL (Transportation for London), and there are two that I've seen with cartoons of an old woman and young guy. The first has the woman saying, "I won't put my bag on the seat," and the guy says, "And I won't put my feet on the seat." The second the woman saying, "I won't eat smelly food," and the guy says, "And I won't blast my music." They're cute. They also have a poster of a stick figure teetering on the tracks with the caption, "Be careful on the tracks after consuming alcohol." Hahaha. Only in the UK.

And in an unrelated update, I finally got to write for work! Yay! There's a section of the website called "Incoming" where there are blogs that are funny, sexy, weird, or "genius." Pictures, videos, or stories are posted, but usually it's just some multimedia with a tiny bit of text. This was my big journalistic moment, though, so I wrote a good paragraph (about things that they probably wouldn't have bothered writing so much about). I get to post these whenever I want, though, so I'll get to keep writing. My posts are here, here, and here. The last one actually has a ton of hits. Guess why?

XOX