Arriving in Seoul for the Second WISE (Women in International Schools Empowerment) conference this weekend – which I am VERY much looking forward to! – I set off early this morning for a ride on the metro. I will confess that it took me a number of years of international travel before I could comfortably embrace the challenges of travelling on the metro/underground/subway in a new city, but once I did, I find myself inexorably drawn to this mode of transport almost as my habitual starting point in any new city.
The metro system in any city provides, I believe, a fascinating intersection between the familiar and the strange for the traveller – an intersection that is thrilling and daunting in equal measure. ‘Familiar’ includes the concept itself of a mass transit system, and practicalities such as the need to buy a ticket to travel, and the need to present the ticket at an automatic gate in order to access the system; ‘strange’, on the other hand, might include the history of the development of the system, as well as the means by which the ticket is purchased, the various rules around what kind of ticket can be used and when, and how to present it at the gate efficiently, without creating a blockage in the queue behind – all of which is gloriously overlain by the instructions in a language different to one’s own (even if English is frequently used on signage in major world cities).
The ‘strange’ is often subtly strange – where to stand, what side of the escalator to use, what expectations of behaviour exist, and how people navigate the space. The strange is why I go to the metro, rather than default always to private cars to take me around from place to place in the cities I visit. It is humbling to experience the helplessness of not knowing where to go, or how to get there, not matter how well-planned the outing through the prior study of guidebooks and metro maps. This helplessness is a reminder to us all that when we experience things for the first time, and often subsequently, we need guides to help us … and also that we can very much learn from those around us, as long as we know that this is how we will grow in our understanding. Humility underpins learning, after all, and one of the dangers as we grow older is that we lose our humility because we surround ourselves always by the familiar. As educators, the sharpness of humility and helplessness connects us with our charges; arguably, it is a necessity of our craft.
When I go to the metro for the first time, I watch people intently, so I have a better idea of what to do, and what is not acceptable. Without them knowing it, they become my guides; watching how they navigate the space reveals unspoken rules and shared courtesies—it is akin in many ways to an intricate dance of social harmony. I am fascinated, too, by the safety videos on various metros, and as I gaze at them, often in perplexity, trying to work out what the cartoon character host is seeking to communicate, they remind me that there are many, many more social norms that I have yet to understand in a different culture. When we travel, we must never take for granted that what we know, others know, or vice versa. It is one of the fundamentals that connects us across the world – our sameness and our otherness.
The strangeness of the metro soon dissipates, as journey layers on to journey, but the delicious feeling of taking the plunge of courage into exploring that intersection of familiar and strange, lasts longer. It is a privilege of travel.
Buses, though … they are a more extreme kind of strange! Metros, at least, have fixed start and stop points, run on fixed rails, and operate according to standardised rules which, once identified, tend to be well-replicated; buses run much more at the whims of their drivers, and have a whole set of different – and differing – rules.
More courage – and heaps more humility – is needed to tackle buses … Onwards and upwards, though!
