Waiting on a subway line

25 June 2012

We need to rewind a couple weeks, so that I can talk about the Santiago subway system.

I dare anyone to find me a more crowded subway outside of Asia. The cars from morning to night are jam-packed with people - at least during rush hour, when I am riding.

Allow me to describe my first encounter with the Santiago Metro. One of my surrogate aunties had graciously helped me aquire a transit pass at the ticket booth. We turned from the ticket lines to enter the system and immediately found ourselves in new lines - for the turnstiles. It turned out that guards were preventing people from entering the entire system because too many people were already downstairs crowding the platform.

Once we finally went down and got to the platform, we had to let jammed trains go by as an incremental few of us waiting could squeeze onto trains that discharged nearly zero passengers. Finally my co-worker just pointed me and pushed me into a train, and we squeezed into vertical gaps. It wasn't necessary to hold on because the mass of people was so tightly packed that no one budged when the train accelerated or braked, held upright from pure compaction. The train was eerily quiet but clean and orderly.

As the train moved along, at certain stops not a single passenger exited, and the mass of humans remained frozen in place like a jello mold as the doors opened, onlookers waiting on the platform dejectedly resigned themselves to waiting for yet another train to pass, and then the doors closed back upon us all exactly as before. Finally a trickle began to exit after a few stops, and then the balance was such that more were exiting than entering and space began to appear within the subway. Breathing was possible, and one could see patches of the floor. Of course, I couldn't actually move to a different spot and change positions, but it was now necessary to hold myself upright with my hands instead of just relying upon the pressure of the packed bodies (sorry claustrophobics). With all the grips around me occupied, I took advantage of my height (in Chile I am usually the tallest on the train) and hung on to the ceiling where two panels came together and left a gap. I remained like this with my fingers wedged in until my stop came up and I had to slice through stubborn bodies to make it off the train while new passengers struggled on.

When I looked down at my hand, the fingers were thickly caked in black soot, like I had been arm wrestling a lump of coal. It proved to be extremely difficult to wipe off, and I pondered how long it, and the whole subway ride experience, would stick with me.