What's the Rush?

The girls and I marvel constantly at how Parisians don't seem to be in a hurry. They saunter, they stroll, they meander, while the three of us careen wildly like pinballs bouncing off the crowds as we rush places. Nowhere is this more evident than in the metro. As we approach the metro, we become weekend joggers. When we get past the ticket booth, we become track and fielders, and if we are near the stairs and hear a train pulling into the station, we run like Olympic sprinters to try to make it on time. Sometimes we make it in the nick of time, jumping onto the train just before the doors close.

The doors close mercilessly here and so we have devised an emergency plan for the (inevitable?) time when either I am separated from the girls or one of them is separated from the rest of us. The plan is this: Whoever is stuck on the train -- either because they didn't get off quickly enough or were the only ones who made it on -- gets off at the next stop and waits in that same spot for the next train. There are not express/local trains to worry about. Those left behind get on the next train and catch up. Even if we have to go the wrong direction, or leave the station that is our actual destination, that's the plan. The girls seem pretty excited to lose me, but we'll see how they feel when it's the real McCoy.

It has taken us a couple months of occasional metro riding to figure out why nobody else is rushing. Sometimes, we run down the stairs, "Aaaargh!!!!" only to find out we have just missed the train. In that case, we look up at the board and discover the next train is coming in 3, or 2 minutes. Sometimes, by the time we can stop panting and look up at the board, the next train has already arrived, and that's not an exaggeration; they sometimes come within 30 seconds of each other. There are so many trains, and they run so efficiently (well, no strikes yet, anyway), that it's almost -- almost -- Japanese. Perhaps it's a holdover from riding the markedly-less efficient Muni buses in San Francisco? Well, at least now we know why we're the only fools running in the Paris metro.