Bethany & The Subway Blunders

Every week I commute to that shiny, overpopulated island that is New York City to intern for Flavorwire, a culture and entertainment website.
Having visited NYC on several occasions prior to my commute there every week, I’m pretty familiar with the subway system, and I can honestly say that I love it. Sure, it’s dirty and there’s a lot of people, but for the most part it’s reliable, cheap, and convenient AND it gives me ample time to read. It’s fantastic.

 However, last week I had some very interesting experiences blunders with the subway. Read on for my account.

Subway Blunder #1
After seeing Swedish band Frederik  at Union Hall in Brooklyn, my friends and I left the venue around 11:30 pm to start our journey back to Manhattan. We needed to take the R train. The stop is five blocks from Union Hall.

So we walked there, went underground, swiped our Metrocards, and waited. After a train that was not the R came and went, the attendent let us know that the R train wouldn’t be running into Manhattan because of track maintenance. Great. He then told us to go across the street to the downtrain bound train, take it to 30-something street and catch a Manhattan bound train there. Okay, cool, whatever.

So we did that. We went 30 blocks in the wrong direction to catch a train to take us back to Manhattan. But, because of the lovely track maintenance, these were the slowest trains known to existence. And the car we were in smelled strongly of piss.

At the next stop we switched cars to one that did not offend our olfactory glands, and then proceeded to take an hour long train ride into Manhattan. Unfortunately, that was not the end of our journey because once we got to Manhattan we had to transfer to another train that took another 30 minutes to get us to our hostel on the Upper West Side.

We left Union Hall at 11:30 pm. We arrived at our hostel at 1:30 am.

Subway Blunder #2
Leaving Flavorwire’s office in SoHo and heading to Penn Station requires a very speedy transfer. I take the B or D train to W 4th and have about 30 seconds to make the transfer to the C train that takes me to Penn Station. Of course, I can wait for the A train, but it’s more fun to rush right? This week proved that theory very wrong.

You see, I travel with a back pack. And on Fridays I take that back pack to work, which means that I have to take it on the subway. It’s a very large back pack. And this past week, while making my quick transfer to the C, the subway doors closed on my back pack.

So I’m standing there, lodged in the C train doors, and two very kind men pried the doors open so that I could get inside the train. Once inside, I spied a seat and headed toward it. As I was about to sit, the train heaved forward, throwing me off-balance and backward, so that I landed on top of a toddler.

Yep. I squashed a toddler.

Lesson: wait for the next trian.