I've only ever taken the LIRR a few times, usually to head out to a summer home my uncle used to have in East Hampton. I think the last time I did so I was 12. My mom brought me up to Penn Station and put me on the train and told me to get off at whichever station my uncle was meeting me at. I did, there were no problems, and I can't remember anything else about it.
Rating: 11 out of 12. I got where I was going, and nothing was awful enough to have made a lasting impression.
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
French Train System
So my first experience with the French train system came a couple years ago when I went with a friend of mine to stay in France for a couple months over the summer, for a study abroad program. I had had the worst two or three days of my life leading up to the trip (relationship drama), and so the plane ride for me wasn't exactly the best thing I've ever experienced. Plus my traveling companion was a new friend, and I didn't know her that well at the time. So upon arrival, I was incredibly stressed out and jetlagged and upset.
Our school had told us that to get from Paris (where Charles de Gaulle is) to Tours (where our university was), we could take the TGV speed train (pronounced, by us silly Americans, as Tay-Jay-Vay). We were told that there is a student discount on it, we were told that it runs every hour, we were told all kinds of nonsense that had little to now basis in actual fact. We arrived somewhere around 9 AM, grabbed our luggage, and made a beeline for the train station terminal in the airport. The French woman behind the counter, acting, as the French do, as though she had no idea that there were people in the world who couldn't speak French, was incredibly unhelpful. She told us that we were not going to be able to catch the train we wanted, and we would have to wait til the afternoon train. She also told us that she had never heard of any such thing as a student discount. We purchased our very expensive tickets and waited patiently for our train to arrive.
The actual train system is pretty nice. You stamp your ticket and get on board. The TGV is very speedy, and people are not allowed to talk on cellphones in the main compartment, you have to go into another special cellphone area so that you don't bother anyone. That's all very nice. It wasn't very nice that we didn't know the difference between first class and coach, and we got in in a first class car and then had to walk almost the length of the train with all of our luggage dragging behind us and knocking into people's elbows. It also wasn't very nice how incredibly tired we were. Finally, the connecting train from the TGV station in St. Pierre-des-Corps to Tours, the final leg of the journey, wasn't very nice: it was almost like a cattle car.
However, the train station in Tours is one of the coolest I've ever been in. Once we arrived we hurried to our apartments which were only about a block away and slept the rest of the day away.
Later, when buying tickets for another train trip, we found out that yes, there are a such thing as student discount tickets and no, we weren't entitled to a refund just because the TGV lady had overcharged us. Wonderful. Anyway, just as anywhere else in Europe, if you are doing a lot of train traveling you probably want to invest in a Student priced Eurail pass.
The non-speed trains are also very nice, and give you a lovely chance to look at the french countryside as you roll by. However - maybe we misunderstood the system, or maybe we just weren't paying enough attention - but when we next returned to Paris for a weekend, we spent an incredibly long amoung of time on the train, rolling through cities which seemed pretty out-of-the-way. My grasp of French geography is not the greatest, though, so maybe we did everything correctly and the TGV is actually three or four times faster than the regular train. Who knows.
Rating: 5 out of 12. Clean and efficient, but awfully expensive and the fact that you have to deal with jerkass French people the entire time is a major drawback.
Our school had told us that to get from Paris (where Charles de Gaulle is) to Tours (where our university was), we could take the TGV speed train (pronounced, by us silly Americans, as Tay-Jay-Vay). We were told that there is a student discount on it, we were told that it runs every hour, we were told all kinds of nonsense that had little to now basis in actual fact. We arrived somewhere around 9 AM, grabbed our luggage, and made a beeline for the train station terminal in the airport. The French woman behind the counter, acting, as the French do, as though she had no idea that there were people in the world who couldn't speak French, was incredibly unhelpful. She told us that we were not going to be able to catch the train we wanted, and we would have to wait til the afternoon train. She also told us that she had never heard of any such thing as a student discount. We purchased our very expensive tickets and waited patiently for our train to arrive.
The actual train system is pretty nice. You stamp your ticket and get on board. The TGV is very speedy, and people are not allowed to talk on cellphones in the main compartment, you have to go into another special cellphone area so that you don't bother anyone. That's all very nice. It wasn't very nice that we didn't know the difference between first class and coach, and we got in in a first class car and then had to walk almost the length of the train with all of our luggage dragging behind us and knocking into people's elbows. It also wasn't very nice how incredibly tired we were. Finally, the connecting train from the TGV station in St. Pierre-des-Corps to Tours, the final leg of the journey, wasn't very nice: it was almost like a cattle car.
However, the train station in Tours is one of the coolest I've ever been in. Once we arrived we hurried to our apartments which were only about a block away and slept the rest of the day away.
Later, when buying tickets for another train trip, we found out that yes, there are a such thing as student discount tickets and no, we weren't entitled to a refund just because the TGV lady had overcharged us. Wonderful. Anyway, just as anywhere else in Europe, if you are doing a lot of train traveling you probably want to invest in a Student priced Eurail pass.
The non-speed trains are also very nice, and give you a lovely chance to look at the french countryside as you roll by. However - maybe we misunderstood the system, or maybe we just weren't paying enough attention - but when we next returned to Paris for a weekend, we spent an incredibly long amoung of time on the train, rolling through cities which seemed pretty out-of-the-way. My grasp of French geography is not the greatest, though, so maybe we did everything correctly and the TGV is actually three or four times faster than the regular train. Who knows.
Rating: 5 out of 12. Clean and efficient, but awfully expensive and the fact that you have to deal with jerkass French people the entire time is a major drawback.
Amsterdam Subway
My experience with the subway in Amsterdam (I think that's the right map) is pretty limited. We used it to get out to the Amsterdam arenA for an Ajax game one night. It is generally pretty fast, but one of my friends had a problem - the ticket machine ate her debit card (she had a six digit PIN and it wouldn't accept that), and so we had to traipse around Amsterdam for about an hour trying to figure out to whom to speak to get her card returned. We were almost late for our dinner before the game. But we made it in time (due in no small part to the subway's speed and efficiency) so no harm done.
The tough part was that after the game, certain subway stops seem to close down. I'm not sure if that is a common thing or if it was just, for whatever reason, happening on the night that we were there, but everyone else exiting the Arena seemed to be confused as well. We asked quite a few people for directions, and followed a group of people, and eventually after walking around for a while (in the freezing cold) we figured out how to get back into Amsterdam proper. In general, I'd recommend it - however, try to look up the schedule beforehand if you are staying out late. Maybe after a certain time only express trains run, I don't know. What I know is that we were very cold for a long time.
I also don't remember the pricing or what the train was actually like inside, so I can't help you there.
Rating: 9 out of 12. Although I don't remember a lot of specifics about this subway, it was easy enough for some foreign girls to navigate while upset and in a hurry, so that should count for something.
The tough part was that after the game, certain subway stops seem to close down. I'm not sure if that is a common thing or if it was just, for whatever reason, happening on the night that we were there, but everyone else exiting the Arena seemed to be confused as well. We asked quite a few people for directions, and followed a group of people, and eventually after walking around for a while (in the freezing cold) we figured out how to get back into Amsterdam proper. In general, I'd recommend it - however, try to look up the schedule beforehand if you are staying out late. Maybe after a certain time only express trains run, I don't know. What I know is that we were very cold for a long time.
I also don't remember the pricing or what the train was actually like inside, so I can't help you there.
Rating: 9 out of 12. Although I don't remember a lot of specifics about this subway, it was easy enough for some foreign girls to navigate while upset and in a hurry, so that should count for something.
PATH Train
So the PATH from New Jersey to New York is a little bit strange. I always thought of it as something like a hybrid train/subway. It's like a train because it travels a pretty long distance between some discrete cities, but it's like a subway in the cost and that it is underground for most of the way. Also in the way it looks, it definitely looks more like a subway than a train.
When you're on the PATH you see a map kind of like this one. For some reason that map always makes me pause for a second. I don't know why - I guess because it has very little basis in geographic fact. This is a more accurate map, but it tells you basically the same information. In New Jersey the PATH stations are scattered around - one in Newark, two (three?) in Jersey City, one in Hoboken, etc - but in New York they're all much closer.
The PATH is cheaper than the subway, so if you are in New York and you need to get from say, Penn Station to Christopher Street, and you're short fifty cents, the PATH train might be for you. But generally, it is used by commuters who don't feel like going through the hassle of driving all the way up to New York, and instead take the train or drive to a New Jersey PATH station; or commuters who just live in the New Jersey outskirts of the city. The PATH also uses MetroCards (described in the NYC Subway post) or these other weird things that I have never used because they are only good on the PATH so what is the point, why not just buy a MetroCard?
It's very convenient - you just have to remember that after 11 on weekdays and after 8 on weekends, it stops using four separate lines and becomes only two lines, which might make your drunken trip back to your car/train take longer than you expected. It also takes longer to get into the city using the PATH than it does using regular NJ Transit trains. However, with the PATH you end up saving something like three dollars over taking the train, which is a pretty good deal and adds up if you are going into the city a lot. You just have to deal with all the drunks who had the same bright idea, which can get annoying after a while. It's also not as comfortable as NJ Transit - cold in the winter, hot in the summer, crowded as hell and pretty rickety. As an added bonus, if you are coming in from Newark and you take the PATH, you can go directly to the WTC so if you are trying to get to the Financial district, Tribeca, the Village, etc., or parts of Brooklyn like Williamsburg or Bed-Sty or whatever, it is a bit more convenient to take the PATH instead of the train and then the subway.
Rating: 7 out of 12. It does exactly what it is supposed to, for cheap, but it is pretty dirty and generally not super pleasant.
When you're on the PATH you see a map kind of like this one. For some reason that map always makes me pause for a second. I don't know why - I guess because it has very little basis in geographic fact. This is a more accurate map, but it tells you basically the same information. In New Jersey the PATH stations are scattered around - one in Newark, two (three?) in Jersey City, one in Hoboken, etc - but in New York they're all much closer.
The PATH is cheaper than the subway, so if you are in New York and you need to get from say, Penn Station to Christopher Street, and you're short fifty cents, the PATH train might be for you. But generally, it is used by commuters who don't feel like going through the hassle of driving all the way up to New York, and instead take the train or drive to a New Jersey PATH station; or commuters who just live in the New Jersey outskirts of the city. The PATH also uses MetroCards (described in the NYC Subway post) or these other weird things that I have never used because they are only good on the PATH so what is the point, why not just buy a MetroCard?
It's very convenient - you just have to remember that after 11 on weekdays and after 8 on weekends, it stops using four separate lines and becomes only two lines, which might make your drunken trip back to your car/train take longer than you expected. It also takes longer to get into the city using the PATH than it does using regular NJ Transit trains. However, with the PATH you end up saving something like three dollars over taking the train, which is a pretty good deal and adds up if you are going into the city a lot. You just have to deal with all the drunks who had the same bright idea, which can get annoying after a while. It's also not as comfortable as NJ Transit - cold in the winter, hot in the summer, crowded as hell and pretty rickety. As an added bonus, if you are coming in from Newark and you take the PATH, you can go directly to the WTC so if you are trying to get to the Financial district, Tribeca, the Village, etc., or parts of Brooklyn like Williamsburg or Bed-Sty or whatever, it is a bit more convenient to take the PATH instead of the train and then the subway.
Rating: 7 out of 12. It does exactly what it is supposed to, for cheap, but it is pretty dirty and generally not super pleasant.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Paris Subway
It's been a few years since I took a ride on the ol' Metro, but even for a mostly-non-French speaker like myself, it is sublimely easy to get around. Unlike the New York subway, on which each line is named a letter or a number that appears to be completely arbitrary, the Parisian Metro names each line with the origination and destination thereof. Superb! Even better, all of Paris is equally covered by the Metro (at least, all of Paris that is interesting and not "le suburbia").
About 10 years ago, my mother managed to figure it out with two whiny teenagers in tow, and more recently, two of my friends and I used it with great success to see everything worth seeing in Paris and then some. In fact, after a day or so, we became just as familiar with it as your average native Parisian. Example: a friend of mine from the States had a Parisian friend, whose number she gave me. I and my two globe-trotting friends gave him a call and he invited us to come hang out. We showed up and all of us got onto the subway, where a good-natured fight broke out between us as to which would be the most expeditious route to our destination. Needless to say, we (filles américaines, mind you) were correct, and in following our new native guides we traveled about 15 minutes out of the way. Not a big deal, except that we were on a tight schedule and one of my travel-mates almost ended up missing her train to Italy because of it.
If everything still operates the same way that it did when I was last there, you have to buy a bunch of inconveniently sized small pink slips, which you feed into a stamp machine for each subway trip and retain throughout the trip, in the fear that a Parisian cop will stop and demand it of you. If you don't have it, I'm not sure what you can do. Plead ignorance, I suppose, though I'm not sure what kind of cop would believe that you thought that the turnstiles were just put there for your gymnastic amusement and not as a barrier for those who haven't paid. Good luck with that.
Also, to save on electricity maybe, the Parisians have neglected to aircondition their subway system. I'm all for saving energy, but rubbing up against dozens of sweaty hairy french people in a crowded train underground is not my idea of a good time.
PS - watch out for buskers. They will follow you around and hit on you, and eventually give you their email address and you may or may not end up corresponding with them for a few years and become their friend and end up hanging out with them every time they come to visit your area of the world, using money that you have no idea where they earned it, obviously not from playing the flute in a subway. It's a mystery.
Rating: 10 out of 12. clean, well planned out, but the ticket system sucks and the summertime heat is unbearable.
About 10 years ago, my mother managed to figure it out with two whiny teenagers in tow, and more recently, two of my friends and I used it with great success to see everything worth seeing in Paris and then some. In fact, after a day or so, we became just as familiar with it as your average native Parisian. Example: a friend of mine from the States had a Parisian friend, whose number she gave me. I and my two globe-trotting friends gave him a call and he invited us to come hang out. We showed up and all of us got onto the subway, where a good-natured fight broke out between us as to which would be the most expeditious route to our destination. Needless to say, we (filles américaines, mind you) were correct, and in following our new native guides we traveled about 15 minutes out of the way. Not a big deal, except that we were on a tight schedule and one of my travel-mates almost ended up missing her train to Italy because of it.
If everything still operates the same way that it did when I was last there, you have to buy a bunch of inconveniently sized small pink slips, which you feed into a stamp machine for each subway trip and retain throughout the trip, in the fear that a Parisian cop will stop and demand it of you. If you don't have it, I'm not sure what you can do. Plead ignorance, I suppose, though I'm not sure what kind of cop would believe that you thought that the turnstiles were just put there for your gymnastic amusement and not as a barrier for those who haven't paid. Good luck with that.
Also, to save on electricity maybe, the Parisians have neglected to aircondition their subway system. I'm all for saving energy, but rubbing up against dozens of sweaty hairy french people in a crowded train underground is not my idea of a good time.
PS - watch out for buskers. They will follow you around and hit on you, and eventually give you their email address and you may or may not end up corresponding with them for a few years and become their friend and end up hanging out with them every time they come to visit your area of the world, using money that you have no idea where they earned it, obviously not from playing the flute in a subway. It's a mystery.
Rating: 10 out of 12. clean, well planned out, but the ticket system sucks and the summertime heat is unbearable.
NYC Subway
I guess this is the major one, the holy grail of public transportation. Basically every movie you see about New York mentions the subway or shows people getting around on the subway, and almost all of them have horror stories about the dangers of the New York subway system or how tough it is to navigate.
It's not that bad.
Despite looking like a multi-colored mess of spaghetti dumped onto Manhattan, if you have a basic idea of where you are and where you want to be it's actually very easy to navigate. Especially with something like Google Maps helping you out. The most danger you're in is getting hit on by a hipster (on the L), or getting peed on by a bum (anywhere). But that's no different from the rest of New York, really.
What you have to watch out for is express trains - they don't make all stops (because that's how express trains work) and you might be expecting to get out somewhere in the 50's and end up somewhere in the Bronx. That's a bad deal and isn't any fun.
For people who have never been on any sort of subway system before, it's not free. The easiest way to do things is to buy a MetroCard, available at lovely big machines in almost any station. Each trip is $2.00, but the best deal is to buy a MetroCard with more than $2.00 on it - you end up getting a free trip depending on how much you spend. It used to be if you bought a $10.00 MetroCard you would get one free trip. It's not that way anymore, I think they've gotten stingier, but the same basic concept applies. And don't worry, the MetroCard vending machine will tell you what to do, no guessing involved.
Manhattan is amazingly easy to get around using the subway. Queens, the Bronx, Brooklyn, all pretty until you get further out on the island and they start to spread out. Staten Island - don't even think about it. As you can see from the maps... there is no subway on Staten Island.
I don't have much else to write, because there isn't much else to write.
Rating: 8 out of 12. Fairly clean and safe but not well thought-out; takes some getting used to.
It's not that bad.
Despite looking like a multi-colored mess of spaghetti dumped onto Manhattan, if you have a basic idea of where you are and where you want to be it's actually very easy to navigate. Especially with something like Google Maps helping you out. The most danger you're in is getting hit on by a hipster (on the L), or getting peed on by a bum (anywhere). But that's no different from the rest of New York, really.
What you have to watch out for is express trains - they don't make all stops (because that's how express trains work) and you might be expecting to get out somewhere in the 50's and end up somewhere in the Bronx. That's a bad deal and isn't any fun.
For people who have never been on any sort of subway system before, it's not free. The easiest way to do things is to buy a MetroCard, available at lovely big machines in almost any station. Each trip is $2.00, but the best deal is to buy a MetroCard with more than $2.00 on it - you end up getting a free trip depending on how much you spend. It used to be if you bought a $10.00 MetroCard you would get one free trip. It's not that way anymore, I think they've gotten stingier, but the same basic concept applies. And don't worry, the MetroCard vending machine will tell you what to do, no guessing involved.
Manhattan is amazingly easy to get around using the subway. Queens, the Bronx, Brooklyn, all pretty until you get further out on the island and they start to spread out. Staten Island - don't even think about it. As you can see from the maps... there is no subway on Staten Island.
I don't have much else to write, because there isn't much else to write.
Rating: 8 out of 12. Fairly clean and safe but not well thought-out; takes some getting used to.
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