An Odyssey through the Underground – Travel Irritations
The first day. The first appointment. New York - the German gang is coming! Highly motivated we leave our spacious accommodation in New Jersey. Curious about New York, curious about our first day. We take a strong step and the walk is longer than expected right at the beginning. From the beginning we start to feel that we are moving in other dimensions. Just to the next subway station turns out to be more than 500 meters. And these skyscrapers! Everything so high here, everything so big, everything so gigantic!
We'll reach the train station. The first obstacle turns out to be a ticket machine. We need 5 minutes to decipher the cryptic digitalization of tickets, to find out which train leads to our destination. Eight cards are finally drawn and distributed, two of them somehow don't work. After dozens of attempts to get the card correctly through the reader, two of us simply jump over the barrier. You should have filmed it ... not so easy. In the film it always looks so easy. We laugh as the legs get entangled in the backwards turning frame. But in the end we have all arrived on the other side. We drive two stations.
The spontaneous plan of the "local" teacher was to take the ship from New Jersey over the Hudson River to NYC. Maps will be solved again. We wait at the jetty. We are still waiting. And another 15 minutes. At some point someone comes up with the idea that it's a holiday and we decide to go to NYC differently. We walk again ... to the train station! Another attempt to buy tickets. The train is coming. We drive black. It's only one station. Nobody arrests us. We get out again.
Oh yes, that was too early, we should have driven two stations. So we go back again. Still in New Jersey! I wonder if we'll ever get to Manhattan today.
Finally we discover a counter in a train station. We buy eight tickets. Again they don't work properly. Repeated attempts to skip over barriers elegantly and in a filmlike way. Well, we just don't have the practice!
And we're finally gonna make it! New York City! What a city!
Our train rides didn't end here, but we got better and better and learned quickly how the public transport network works and how NYC is structured.