Quik Thinking

We either walked or took public transit everywhere we went [except for a single ill-fated adventure involving a free cab ride that I shall describe in another post]. In London I rode the Tube to work and back every day. This gave me a feel for what it's like to live in London. It also filled my head with thoughts of the black lung as I flirted with asphyxiation in poorly ventilated underground trains. I initially chalked this up to the fact that London has the oldest subway system in the world but that excuse stopped holding water when I saw the Metro in Budapest, whose subway system was built only a few years after London's but felt vastly more spacious and cleaner. I actually liked the Budapest Metro very much and it had only one problem that I discovered while riding it: if you enter from the wrong side on one of the 3 lines, there's no way to get to the other side without using another token. We did not see a subway per se in Istanbul but we rode the light rail system, which was always crowded despite being scarcely faster than walking. It reminded me of the VTA light rail that runs between San Jose and Mountain View, which I fondly refer to as "the choo-choo train" because of it's absurdly slow speed.

Although I never had a chance to experience riding one of London's famous double-decker buses, we did ride buses in 3 other cities.Budapest, and Brasov have similar systems that involved purchasing tickets in advance and validating them on the bus while Plovdiv still relies on a conductor to sell you a ticket upon boarding. The human touch is a bit friendlier but it does seem rather inefficient, although I guess that this trade-off looks different depending on the cost of labour. We tried to travel on foot for short distances (within a couple of miles) but after a long day of walking we sometimes found ourselves taking the bus just so we could rest our feet!