The Cosmopolitan Blog

So my european experience continues… on the tube… aaaah, the british tube!  Actually, i’ll be honest, it took me a while to remember, it wasn’t called the subway like in NYC, it wasn’t called the metro like in Montreal, or the T like in boston. it’s the underground, or the tube in good ol’ England.

I remember hating it when i was growing up here. I remember thinking the stations were dirty & old looking, the trains were run down, and i just remember wishing that something, anything! would change or get updated.

I got to montreal & thought, waow, now this is nice. Clean modern looking stations, no low tunnels to walk through, stores just off the platforms, even elevator music playing… and that was before they even installed TVs with weather, news & times for the next trains!

And yet now, here i am, returning back to those old tube stations. & my entire perspective has changed. What looked old and decrepit now seems authentic and historical, images of WWII movies w/ people hiding from the bombs… and they’ve now obviously modernized certain things like the trains, the notification screens…

Granted, the service is just as innefficient as ever, but then not every wish can come true.

Either way, today for the first time, i realize i had lived in london as a rebelious teenager wanting everything to be hip & new & advanced, regardless of what would be lost in the process… & i returned as a mature adult (each of these words on their own make me cringe, let alone put together in an expression to describe me!), realizing that not everything new is good, that heritage and history is so important and that there is no such thing as the perfect place to live (or we’d all be living there, wouldn’t we?).

Well, the moral of the story might simply be that i’m getting old… or it might be that everything and everyone deserves a 2nd chance, a 2nd look, even london… If ever you get a chance to go back to where you grew up, go there, it’s worth the experience…