Subte D

The subway line between my room and the school is Subte D.  Perhaps you have seen pictures of the professional pushers in the Tokyo subway.  In Buenos Aires the pushers are not pros, just regular riders of Subte D who want to get to work on time.  It is an amazing experience.  It reminds me of being near the front of the stage when a mosh pit breaks out.  Near the stage you already have a push and a crowd, but a mosh pit generates an opening in the audience behind which pushes even more against the rows of people between the mosh pit and stage. 

I shudder to think of a mosh pit breaking out on Subte D.  But everyone is wearing an iPod and who knows what they are listening to.  The iPods are part of a larger veil of impersonality.  Porten’os, as the natives of BA are called, are similar to Americans in their preference for personal space.  So when my head is 6” from another guys on the subway, he does his damndest not to make eye contact; even as his hand is pressed into the side of my hip by the packing force of the lattice.

Some days, you can feel people physically pushing on you from all 4 sides.  Once a woman shouted in Spanish to people outside the car what I think translated as “no more in, I can’t breathe”.  The starts and stops aren’t particularly smooth, which is actually good when the train is this packed.  I wind up pressed in different places and my weight is no longer centered.  When the train bumps off the start line, it is like the little shake you give the frying pan to level out the location of all the contents.   It helps you get everyone upright and evenly spaced, if there were space anyway.

The other issue is air quality.  They have windows open and fans that run in the top of car.  But that level of people dander and hair products still activates my allergies.  This is a problem when you can’t easily move your arms.  I can lift my collar without needing to move my elbow away from my body.  This is useful to catch a sneeze inside my jacket.  But getting one’s hanky out in this environment takes logistical planning similar to starting a typical engineering project.  Thank goodness for my training.