I wonder why traveling on Barcelona metro doesnt freak or stress me out nearly as much as the London Underground. Perhaps it is because it isn't so far below the ground and is somehow more airy and less chlostraphobic. I`m imagining that we are not so far down beacuse mobile phones seem to work....so youre now just cut off from civilization`...stuck panic-room stlye in a dark black sewer tube.
But then again...if the whole tube network is that much closer to the surface...doesnt that make it all quite architectually unstable... will the city some day soon collapse into lines 3 5 and 6? Hmmm.
Maybe it's because Barcelona city council provide free music for traverlers waiting on platforms. And how can you be intimidated by a system that plays- unconsciusly one imagines -Christmas music in July and a mixture of the Beatles and Oasis in December.
Maybe the security announments also help... smoking is not allowed but jumping down onto the metro tracks is strictly not and never allowed... one feels they have a sensible health and safety prioritisation going n here. Our best interests at heart. Though fines seem to be in opperation for smoking but not for rail jumping. 30 euros and 5 cents. Why the 5 cents? Why?
O...and there is also music provided both on the metro journey and in the metro entrances. The journey music varies substantially but has one thing always in common – there is a soloist of some sort accompanied kareoke style by an onwheels kareoke machine. Solists include acordianists, guitarists, clarinetists and in more traditional mode ...singers. This is more financially complicated than the town hall station music...which is included in the price of your ticket. The quesiton is ...how much do you pay...its a voluntary contribution sometimes encouraged by soloist's accomplice who does a run of the carriage with a plastic cup. I look eagerily to see whether people set a lead worth following and see that it tends to be people with greying hair and wrinked knowledge reaching deep for purses and small change. How many times a day should you reach deep for if you make numerous metro journeys I wonder...and should payment be based on merit , or pity or both or neither. It's hard to say.
The most difficult soloist to listen to is the wailer... she screachs dramatically and operates without a backing tape of any description...'ooooo wooooooooooooo is me....have mercy....millk for my poooor children......' the strangest part of this performance is the sudden visible cut from on-scene to backstage as she preparess to disembark and begin the play again.
Most solisits in metro entrances do have backing music of some description – not normally any wailers there....though there are the beggars-opera style setups which can be inevitably more disturbing than wailing, as malformations are competitively displayed to best advantage... with the weather turning cold there is something infinitely unsettling in seeing 4 splitting red stumps cruelly exposed to the inclemment wind... and bringing out deeper levels of cynicism I wonder how poor 4-stump got to target place a and who the money in the collction pot would be going to.
In contrast to this some of the soloists do raise a smile. One panpiper in metro entrance c was playing a tune called flower song.... strange. I played that on the piano many years ago except my brother told me that I was missing the light fluffy character of the whole thing...and that it sounded like the poor flowers were stuck in the mud...or was it that it sounded like people were wading through mud, one or the other at any rate. Panpipe man was doing a much better job than me, though amazingly it must have been the current backing tune on the block because at the following station there was soloist number two also having a good bash at it, but this time playing the recorder and sounding not so much like a mud discourse but more like a stormy sea discourse...this poor soloist hadnt even made it to kareoke machine level and was still stuck with backing music coming from a portable cd player...and it sounded like he could be stuck with it for some long time to come...unless there are mechanisms of purchase in that world that I know nothing about. Hmmm. The flower song, I think I'll get that out and have another go at it when I get home.
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