NYC Mission Trip: Getting Around On The Subway

In Brooklyn, New York, people have only two ways to get around:  walk or take the subway.  Unless you are in Manhattan, where the tourists hang-out, there are no taxis, few busses, and hardly anyone owns a car.  During our mission trip, we spent A LOT of time riding the subway!  Honestly, it was a lot of fun.  Depending on how fast your subway car is going and how many curves there are, it can feel a bit like an amusement ride.  

Several things surprised me about the subway.  First, how clean it was.  I had always envisioned the subway as a place filled with graffiti and trash.  But it wasn't that way at all.  In fact, we only saw one or two subway rats!  Secondly, I was surprised by how expensive it was.  I thought you just paid a quarter or two and rode the subway.  But it costs $32 per person/per week for a subway card.  To put that in perspective, it cost my family of five over $150 to ride the subway for one week!

So here's how you ride the subway.  First, you have to buy a subway card for every person who will be riding.  It's like a thin credit card. Because subway cards are so expensive and so necessary, people will sometimes steal credit cards just to buy subway cards.  So you're only allowed to buy two of them at one time...which made it tricky when we were trying to buy seven of them for everybody on our mission team!  Next, you find your nearest subway entrance.  But be careful: not every subway entrance takes you where you want to go.

 Once you know you're at the right subway entrance, you'll find a turn-style where you swipe your card and enter the subway.  You might remember that a few weeks ago, Hillary Clinton made the news when she couldn't get her subway card to swipe.  (Neither could we: it hardly ever works the first time.)

So after you've made it in, you just go stand at the stop for where you're going and wait for the subway.  It doesn't take long.  They run every five or ten minutes.  You can see that John and Christopher (below) were waiting on the L train to Manhattan.

Once you're on your subway car, you'll see a digital read-out that tells you all the stops.  You wait until your stop to get off.  This digital read-out is vital to knowing when to get off, because since you're underground and it's dark in the subway, every stop looks exactly the same.  

 And that's it!  The kids especially liked holding on to the poles and standing-up. 

-Kara