A View from a Train

I felt like Gilligan today. I left my house at about 8:15 and went on a three-hour tour (cue the music...Now sit right back and you'll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip...). It took three hours for me to get to work today in Center City. Three hours.

First, I waited for over an hour for my R5 train to arrive. (To SEPTA's credit, they did keep coming on the loudspeaker and blaming Amtrak for a downed powerline, all the while extending how late the train would be.) I waited at my open air station for an hour in the cold. Ah, it finally arrived and I thought, "I'll get on and thaw out. Quick trip in." Wrong on both accounts. It was freezing on the train. And I got to experience the joy for a looooong time.

The train took two hours to putter and stutter into Philadelphia. I had a lot of time to a) write some on my Powerbook, b) play solitaire on my Treo 650, c) realize that I forgot to charge my iPod Nano, and d) realize that I have a lot of electronic gizmos. So, I decided that gazing at my bellybutton lint wasn't all that practical on a full train, so I started taking pictures with my Treo. Here's what a little over two hours on the most ancient SEPTA car imaginable gets you.


This Sony PSP ad for Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories was right in front of me. I should have taken a shot of the NC-17 warning: "Warning: This title may contain intense violence, blood, and gore, sexual content, and/or strong language. You must be 17 or older to purchase this item. This product is intended for mature audiences only." That was in tiny print. The ad was targeted at 13-year-olds and old guys like me stuck on the train for two hours. (BTW: I paid attention to the poster because of Albert's photo documentation of the PSP tags around Philadelphia.)


I started to run out of things to look at. I spent a lot of time contemplating my shoes. I like these shoes. They're not yellow on the stripe like it shows in the photo, but I thought it would make me appear cooler if I had shoes with a yellow stripe so I didn't fix that in PS. As I was staring at my shoes I was thinking I need a pair of Chuck Taylor All-Stars like Pax got.


And here's my view out the right side of my R5 car. You'll notice that there's not any blur in this picture of Philadelphia rowhouses between Overbrook Station and 30th Street Station. That's because we were standing still. For a really long time. I did have a view of a really cool stripped Acura for a while, but then the train lurched forward a hundred feet or so, so this is the shot I took.