My Favorite Thing in London

by hanje53

Oddly, the thing that I liked best in London was not a museum or a library or a castle.  It wasn’t a store or a neighborhood or a restaurant.  I saw lots of art and fashion and history and culture.  I saw churches and towers and statues. I saw vast collections of stuff.  I saw amazing architecture and places both famous and infamous.  What I expected to like best barely even made the list, and what I never even considered ended up being my favorite thing. 

I thought the most amazing thing in London was the Tube, the Underground, the Subway, if you will.  Not a stranger to public transportation, even the subways of New York, I found myself looking at the Tube Map, planning our trip for the day.  At first we would get in the queue and ask how to get from point A to point B, but soon it was clear that we usually had figured it out on our own, and if not the best route, then certainly a good enough route. 

That station closest to our hotel was Bayswater Station.  Bayswater was close to Paddington Station, and Notting Hill and a lot of other places I knew about from movies and books.  We bought an Oyster card for a week, and then had to add to it (or top it up) a couple of times as our ten days progressed (twice because we went outside of the zones that were covered by our oyster cards, and the last two times because we had used up our original 7 days). 

Sign for Bayswater Station, the Tube, London

It is not cheap to travel around in London.  I believe it is over 5 pounds a day, but that covers unlimited buses and trains, as long as you stay within the zones that you pay for.  The oyster card turns out to be a pretty good deal if you are using it every day.  It is not such a good deal if you take a day or two off and don’t ride any public transportation.  The more you don’t use it, the more it costs. 

I am not really a puzzle person.  I am impatient, and if the solutions do not come easily, I get frustrated and think that there are other ways I could be spending my time (e.g. reading a book, watching a movie, taking a nap.)  However, I found the puzzle of plotting my route on the Tube rather enjoyable.  There were usually multiple “correct” answers.  I didn’t have enough time to get terribly familiar with the stations that were on our routes, so I didn’t know if one station was going to have more steps to climb or be more windy or more crowded, I had to just look at the brightly colored lines on the maps in and around the station and strategize the transfers that would take me to the desired location.

Sometimes there was still a hike after disembarking, but generally, once a station had been achieved, it was a fairly quick walk to the goal, be it a museum, a theatre, or some other venue. 

I am not sure I can even pinpoint what I liked best about the Tube.  Was it the fact that it was like a puzzle, but one I not only could be successful in solving, but also one that had such an instantaneous and gratifying reward when the puzzle was completed?  Was it the colorful lines and the charming station names on the oversized maps that made it seem like a children’s game?  Was it really reaching the endpoint, the historic site, the place of higher learning, the church, the temple of knowledge that was the valuable part of the game?  Or was it as I suspect a combination of being in a city that required, demanded, actually needed such an extensive mass transit system; a city so old that the Tube was, although a relatively recent addition, still an historic feature of the city; or was it a combination of the pleasure of the win, the score, the ultimate achievement of arriving at the very place I intended to arrive and the feeling that in a matter of days, hours really, I was a part of this vibrant, lively, enormous city and I had at some level conquered the transportation system that I had read about in a hundred books?

Tube Map, the Tube, London

Whatever combination it was, it made traveling in and around London a fun part of each day and of each experience.  Yeah, The British Museum was interesting and all that, but the Tube….well, I conquered the Tube.