uppercase F

Chaos in the Underground May 31, 2008

OMG. Ohmigod. Oh…My…God. So I have had one heck of a crazy day. I’ll get to the Underground insanity in a minute, but this afternoon I went to see a matinée showing of Afrika! Afrika! with my friend Kathleen. Thanks to Kathleen’s superb connections we were able to sit in an executive box, and get a sweet view of the show. The show itself is incredible. I mean, un-freaking-believable. I spent most of the show worrying for the performers’ lives. Now if that doesn’t spell a good show, then I don’t know what does.

After I got home I decided to scope out the Underground scene. As some of you may have heard, they are banning alcohol on the tube as of June 1st. I had heard from many sources (including my mom) that there were going to be some parties going on tonight to celebrate ones ability to consume alcohol on trains. Specifically, there was going to be parties on the Circle Line, which as you can imagine runs in one big circle around the center of London. So, as I’m taking my little train to the center of London I notice that there are quite a few people partaking in the booze. By the time I reach King’s Cross it’s just absolute anarchy. There are thousands of people on the platforms screaming and yelling and toasting, some of them in fancy dress. Everyone was waiting for the Circle Line to arrive. At King’s Cross many different trains come into the same platform and the London Transport people were smart enough to stop announcing what platform the Circle Line was coming into. But it wasn’t enough to stop the swarm of people. I followed the crowd into a Circle Line train, where there must have been a couple hundred people in my carriage alone. Everyone was chanting and banging on the windows and ceiling. A favorite chant of the crowd was “Boris is a wanker!” (the mayor of London), which they kept chanting over and over again. Hilariously, there was a group of American girls next to me who were chanting along and one of them turned to their friend and said “What’s a wanker?”. People were banging on the ceiling so hard the lights actually turned off multiple times.

I don’t know if you can tell from the pictures, but there was a poor man in a suit who was just trying to get home. After turning down multiple offers of drinks he decided to depart the train. So… after traveling around for awhile on the sin wagon (and getting mooned- jokes on you guys, because now your asses are on the internet), the train gets to a stop and doesn’t move for about 10 minutes. Everyone starts yelling and screaming, and news gets back to us that the driver has left. That’s right- the train driver got out of the train and quit. Unbelievable. So everyone is kicked out of the train, and it is absolutely trashed. I mean, trashed like you’ve never seen. People had torn the signs and maps off the walls of the train. The ads were pulled down. There were beer bottles everywhere. Everyone was forced to get on another train, which was promptly trashed as well. I spent 2 and a half hours going around on the trains, and I only made it around the loop once. It usually only takes an hour to make one loop.

As I was taking my train back up to my house they kept making announcements regarding the closure of entire stations and lines due to the craziness. The Circle Line was closed completely. And I think it’s going to be a challenge to get the trains ride-able by tomorrow morning. There were people on all of the Circle Line trains, and I’m sure when they closed the line people just moved onto a different line. At the end of the night I came home with a piece of history- an underground map from the ceiling of a Circle Line train.