This is my subway story. 1986. Berlin Wall still there. S-Bahnstation Humboldthain. I was standing in front of the ticket machine. No money, no jacket, no mobile phone (they haven’t been invented yet). I must have been 9 years old or so. Tears ran over my cheeks. I was missing my parents so much. I decided not to wait for them to come home. I wanted to go where they are. Somewhere in Neukölln. I remember a station called “Kottbusser Strasse” or was it “Kottbusser Tor”? I was playing He-Man at my friends place in the first floor, when I found out that they dissapeared. Our apartment was in the third floor. Wedding. Worker’s district. Where parents just leave their kids alone. I forgot the keys and I knew that my parents were at the new Asia Grocery Store, a tiny Import Export shop in Sanderstrasse in Neukölln. My father’s new project. I took the S-Bahn but I had no money. Fortunately a Woman gave me a ticket. I started off for my first adventure ever. What if I got lost? What if I miss the right station? Or even worse: Miss to exit at the final station and wake up in the middle of a black yard tunnel, swallowed by the Berlin underground. I remember crying the whole trip.
My father is an enterpreneur. Or used to be. I still today don’t get it how he managed to write bills, signing contracts with partners and negotiating with the public offices without understanding german properly and also without accepting german tax laws. He was about to open the shop very soon and he had to brief the carpenter who will build a shelf for vegetables and a cash table at the front window. In the back room he installed an office where he stacked Leitz-files from top to bottom. All stickers were lettered precisely with chinese signs (obviously a good way to make taxmen suspicious). He also had a Schneider Computer, a big monster with a green monitor screen, that turned this tiny office into a factory somehow. I never felt welcome in this world of files, calculators, cardboard boxes and instantnoodles. Sometimes I hided myself between two shelf walls, sitting on the ugly brown carpet covering reading Marvel Comics. Spiderman was my hero and I decided to become a comic writer and move far far away to Manhatten, when I am a grown-up. There I will pencil for Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and will have coffee breaks at the kitchen bar with my mentors Todd McFarlane, Sal Buscema and John Romita Jr. We would reinvent the world as we want it to be and we would fear new villains and would create new superheroes who will fight them on the rooftops of Manhatten. When I turn 30, this was pretty clear, I will become a comic artist. This is what I promised to myself, between the shelfs in that shop in Neukölln. Actually what happened? When I turned 30, I started to work for an architecture office a few blocks away from that shop. And what do I design? Shops. Shelfs. Offices. No Superheroes, no villains, no Manhatten rooftops.
To cut a long story short: I made it to the shop. I survived. I got there, without getting lost or being kidnapped.
Actually after that experience I became a public transport maniac. I started to travel all Comic book shops in West Berlin, and I even didn’t fear to trespass Friedrichstrasse in Ost Berlin where the soldiers patrol armed with huge machine guns.
I like riding the bike but I love sitting in the subway reading a book, writing a blog or just observing people and their shoes. Wow so many Converse sneakers.
I buy a monthly ticket since I am a teenager, and I forgot that ticket at home a thousand times. And I enjoy it so much riding the subway in foreign countries. You learn so much about the rhythm of a city and unwritten codes. What I really like is the New York subway, the cable car in Lissabon is so romantic, the cable car in San Francisco completely overrated, and the metro in Beijing is too clean and odd. The metro in Istanbul is not a metro, but an alibi (only two stops), and the metro stations in Helsinki are colored caves. Taking the subway is the modt democratic way to travel. There are no classes, and everybody has access to it (even the ones without money can use it – illegally).
Some say that it is not safe, some say it stinks, some say it’s noisy. But it’s not the subway, it’s the society which is not safe, that stinks and full of noise. I like to meeting people I haven’t seen for a long time by coincidence. When I used to be a freelancer, I really enjoyed pitching ideas within two or three stops. In elevators you call this kind of presenting elevator pitch. I am a master in Metro pitching. And when I was a teenager I also often fell in love with girls that had just gone through the slide door. And some (but a very few) I really met again one day. Al Pacino once said in the movie “The advocat’s devil” that as a rich powerful enterpreneur you need to take the subway. You are fast and you are close to the society. I think he is right.
The Berlin U-Bahn is a cultural heritage. And I still enjoy it today with 37. And whenever I have a ticket over I pass it to the ones at the ticket machines. You never know which story you can accelerate with passing someone a free ticket to the Berlin underground.