Metro People - Intro / Pilot episode

Leyendeker Strasse U-Bahn Station (Köln Ehrenfeld)

Source : U-Bahn Haltestelle Leyendekerstrasse

My first post was dedicated to the source of my inspiration, my muse, the one that made me determined to starting writing in the first place, and it was also kind of a non-conventional description of little me. But there are many (maybe less significant) inspirational resources out there and yet more ideas that wait in the pipeline. One of them (an endless source of inspiration and analysing) are the metro/ subway/ underground /S-Bahn / U-Bahn people... you may call them however you like. I choose to call them simply metro people, from here on.

This is just an intro to a series of episodes to come. At first I intended it to be just one post. But that was more than one year ago, when I first stepped in a Cologne subway (actually in a subway. period).

But since then I've been travelling at least 2 hours / day, 5 days / week, circa 60 weeks. That leads to a total of approximately 600 hours. That would be 25 full days! Quite impressive, ha? Can you imagine how many things one can do in that time? For starters you can watch people, you can observe the prototypes, draw sketches in your mind. And that's what I love most. After some time, I learnt some of them by heart and the excitement grew smaller by the day. Then I started reading, fiction that is. That means another happy meal for imagination, but the other way around. When you see people, their "shell" and body language, their fashion style, their ways of walk and talk, their mimic, you try to imagine what they are thinking, what's the story behind the face/ mask/ beard/ glasses/ burka.

With books on the other hand, you know the characters, you know their deepest thoughts, their hidden agendas, and as far as their faces are concerned, you get so many pictures as many readers there are.

Then I moved to the west side of the city, so other metros, other faces and new excitement. So I went back to reading. But doing the reading thing doesn't mean I don't raise my head out of the book, at times, to watch, admire, judge and get intrigued by a random stranger.

So, not to lose coherence, all that impressive amount of time spent in the "subway"( not always literally subway), which by far I do not consider to be a waste, made me realize I will never make it in one single post.

There are way too many profiles and each one of them is unique, one of the kind and deserves my full attention (maybe yours as well, if my writing will get seductive enough, to keep you drawn to the text). So I figured out the only way to do things right is opening a series of posts, each post for a certain metro profile. I still don't know how many episodes or who knows, maybe "seasons" will be. But since I don't plan on buying and driving a car any time soon...this could be a loooong thread. So, once I became clear with this, there were 2 open issues left: language and authenticity.

Obviously, there's no need to say that there is no tongue I can express myself better in than the mother tongue. And I guess that applies to all common people. Still, since I was about to write about Cologne metro people, I felt kind of obligated to write in German. BUT... that would have been too much of an effort on my side, and how was I to share with my non-German speaking friends? So given these facts, and my will to reach a bigger target of readers (hahaha!), English seemed the perfect compromise between Romanian and German. English is always the perfect compromise. We do use at least an English word every other sentence nowadays after all, don't we ( especially on IM )?

So one issue to go: originality. And that's a sensitive topic to me! There's nothing I despise more in this life than fake: fake people, fake smiles, fake words and mostly fake art. I'd like my writing, like everything else I create to be , if not awesome, if not out of this world, if not genius, at least honest, authentic and true. So, just before writing these lines, I did a little google-ing and all I got were photos of metro people (that will be good material by the way) , commercials or casual stuff. But this was just a 5 minutes digging so I cannot really call it research and I still feel kind of threatened of being a second, a third or just one in a thousand bloggers who write about metro people. Who knows...maybe there are books, songs, poems out there..all about my favorite characters. But you know what they say... "Out of sight, out of mind"...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~TO BE CONTINUED~~~~~~~~~~~~~~