Day Two

Adriaan threw his half-smoked cigarette on the pavement and stormed up the steps. We were taking a spin on the Metro and there was no smoking allowed. Or eating. Or, it seemed, anything which might leave a trace. The train’s platform was—and I looked hard for trash, scum, anything—as sterile as a hospital ward. As Adriaan put it: “If the actual action didn’t dirty the place, you could eat off the floor, if you know what I mean?”

The train—which I noted ran on rails unlike Mexico City’s rubber tire and guide line system—was equally spotless. But as the city started rolling by, I quickly forgot about cleanliness. In every other city and town I’ve visited in Latin America, walls are generally made of gray cinderblocks. In Medellín, while the cinderblocks have gone nowhere, they’ve all turned to a light maroon. It is as if all the houses that climb up the sloping walls of the valley, large and small, finished and unfinished, were made of brick. It is beautiful.

A few stops after we got on, a middle-aged woman and her elderly mother boarded the train through the door closest to us. In the otherwise crowded train, the space immediately between the inner and outer doors was clear, but the design of the train—near the doors the low roof bars curve up to the ceiling and out of reach—left the daughter grasping for a hand hold. She couldn’t reach the curving bar and as the standstill time ticked away, her even shorter mother started looking around in a mild panic. To the mother’s relief, as the doors closed a man relinquished part of a vertical pole, and the daughter, after a slight stumble as the train started, wedged herself into the crowd to get a handful of the lower hanging portion of the pole.

The whole episode, recounted here in far too much detail, made me naturally focus on the actual running of the train. And wow! In addition to being undoubtedly the cleanest metro system I have ever ridden—Atlanta’s system a close second, London’s interiors a very distant third, and New York, Paris, Miami, Boston, Mexico City and the Bay Area all not making the charts—it is easily the smoothest. (It likely helps there is really only one line, a long stretch along the length of the valley, with only one or two arms.)