Subway Surfing

One of the most difficult things for me to get used to in Santiago has been the Chilean concept of personal space. Meaning, of course, a complete lack of any. Walking down the street it's a completely common occurance to be bumped into, run off the sidewalk, nearly hit by bikes, and basically feel like everyone is intentionally trying to make you feel under assault. Riding the bus or metro is a similar experience. The trains are so packed that it's normal to have 5 people pressed right up against you, forcing you to hold your bookbag over your head like someone wading across a river. Even when is nobody on the bus, you feel like people are hovering around you. Today on the way to class, I was sitting next to a guy about my age in the back row of the bus, who even though no one was sitting in the seat on his other side, was insistent of spreading his legs and pressing up against me, practically shoving me out the window. Maybe Chileans are just conditioned to press up against each other.

Still, I have never seem as many people cram into buses or trains as I have here. An example- Monday, coming back from class during rush hour, there were so many people on the bus that I was literally forced to sit in somebody's lap, while 10 people were running along side the bus trying to jump through the back exit door, which has been conviniently pried open and not allowed to close due to the people crammed into the back stairway. I would have felt scared at the image of hurtling down the street at 50 miles an hour with the back door of the bus wide open, but I was so tightly wedged into the nice woman's lap behind me that short of an explosion ripping the bus in two, I wasn't going anywhere under any circumstances. Including having to get off (if I had a peso for the amount of times I've been unable to get off at my stop... I'd still be poor, but with a large pile of 1 peso coins).

Compare this to New York, where everyone puts up little barriers around themselves on the subway- newspapers, iPods, elbows, surly glares. And people get genuinely uncomfortable at the prospect of having to ride in a packed subway car- you can almost feel the sign of relief when people get off the 1 train at 103rd St after being packed in after the 96th Street switch from the 2/3. As for me, I gotta admit that while I love certain aspects of the transit system here, I'm too much of an American (with my 40 acres and a mule and all) to get too comfortable here. Dodging bikes and people on the sidewalk is one thing, but it takes a lot of get accustomed to continual invasion of my personal space.