An Open Letter to Small Town Folk Who Come to the Big City

Photo by Adi Goldstein on Unsplash

So, I live in the inner suburbs of Washington, D.C. Every summer, pre-COVID, we would get an inrush of tourists. NYC gets them. London gets them. (By the way, post-COVID, if you want to come to D.C. to see the Mall and museums and don’t have kids in school? I strongly suggest September. Spring has the cherry blossom craziness and summer is ridiculously hot as well as crowded).

And a lot of these tourists are small town people. So I’d like to talk about one specific aspect of big city living that small town people struggle with. It’s not your fault. You don’t do it on purpose.

None of you know how to use a subway, Metro, underground, or whatever it’s called. Ahem. It’s fine. I’d get lost in your town too.

So, I just want to lay it out there. Every system is different, but there are some things which are the same.

Look up the Turnstiles/Faregates Before You Come

Please! There’s nothing more “fun” for the locals than a knot of tourists blocking every entrance while they stare like a bunch of annoyed sheep at the faregates.

Every system’s faregates work differently, but typically you have some kind of card which you have to swipe or insert somewhere.