mass transit

"Well I’m waiting down this train station
Waiting for that train, waiting for the train
Take me from this lonesome place"

-hear my train coming, jimi hendrix

“You like trains?” Niza asked, the last time I was with her. I was looking at her reflection on the train glass door. She had what seemed like a handbag but was really a small backpack. We were passing round a bend to the central station from petaling jaya, the KL night lights swirling outside the window.

“I like trains,” she said, flashing a toothy smile and nodding her head, agreeing enthusiastically with what she just said.

I then remembered the pictures that she took on her train trip to Geneva, hazy renderings of the German countryside, like smudged glassy prints they use on gloomy motion blur filtered European film posters. They contrasted with the flying gestures and wide smiles with which she recounted that trip, exactly the way she told me about the Grand Central station in New York.

I once took the train in Copenhagen to have a Filipino lunch in the house of a young couple that I introduced myself to when I heard them speak Tagalog near the Vietnamese eatery where I was eating curried bean sprouts. That was one peculiar Sunday, by the time I was eating adobo in their place, they already had me swim in a topless beach and raise my hands in a Christian charismatic mass.

I also rode the Toronto train from Montreal to have a weekend rendezvous with my US relatives at the border in Niagara falls. I had fun riding the subway trains of Montreal, straining my ears at the French station names, “Place des Artes! Place des Artes!”, and getting off at underground shopping malls that felt like how it must be in Asimov’s central planet in his Foundation series where nobody lives in the surface anymore, just like in one of the underground centers in Osaka, only I did not get to use the subway there because all the signs were in Japanese and directions really seem to get lost in translation.

It’s easier in Thailand, going to Silom is such a breeze taking the BTS. The last I was there the subway was finally operational and we took it going to the blues bar near Banglampoo where Niza brings her friends to. About a decade ago we asked each other how we see ourselves in about ten years. She said by that time she will be traveling abroad attending international conferences,while I said I might still be what I was then, penniless and “nakikitulog kung saan saan.” A counselor told me to be careful of self talk because it tends to find a way to fulfill itself.

In the KL skytrain with Niza, I remembered another train we rode in Malaysia before, the overnight train we took from Bangkok to Butterworth on our way to Penang in one of her previous visa runs, where the train guy would pull out the bunker beds way before anybody was really sleepy. On the ferry to Penang we befriended a young Japanese from the same train we had who told us Sony and Aiwa have the same owners. We had a picture taken with him. He was with us when we went to a restaurant in the Indian neighborhood where there was this chubby kid at the cash machine, not more than twelve, who, with a wave of his right hand and a twinkle in his eye, told us, “Oh I give you discount!”

I remembered how it was, I smiled at Niza and told her, “Yeah, i love trains.”