a promdi's MRT woes

I used to fear speed; I remember shutting my eyes throughout my maiden flight and hypnotizing myself on my first MRT ride. In time though I had to lick my MRT fears if only to increase malling time when in Manila.

In my recent trip however, the MRT had come to mean endless queuing, thus giving me a reason to shun it anew. For instance: to get a passage card I had to line up; to enter the passenger bay, again I had to line up; yet again, I had to line up to exit. And mind you, the snaking lines crisscrossed each other on the limited space, baffling me as to which line led where.

One time during rush hour, I joined a queue that got me to the ticket booth longer than it took eternity to end. Then to my shock, the ticket girl said she was only accepting exact fares and that if I could please line up again in the next booth. Whaaaaat???!!!

Going to the tail end of another kilometric line, I grumbled: Why not let the makeshift stalls sell MRT cards like they do with cell cards? Promdi transients like me won’t mind paying extra for the hassle it will save us.

Finally clasping a smiling Ate Glo, I lined up and fed her to the machine. As I walked toward an area in the terminal, I saw mainly women passengers. I was about to ask where had all the men gone when a girl pointed to me the waiting area for male commuters. So the MRT had turned gender sensitive! I was quite impressed, but then I saw women milling about the male zone.

As the train wailed from a distance, everybody moved to the edge and poised to hurl himself inside once it stopped and the door hissed open. Sandwiched between warm bodies and forever wary of pickpockets, I had one hand clasping my cell phone and another, my wallet. As the crowd surged forward, I turned buoyant, letting the human tsunami wash me aboard where, packed like cigarettes, we traded sweats and breaths.

Certain after a while a pickpocket couldn’t do his trick no more than I could shift my weight, I put my hands on my face to ensure it wouldn’t get swapped in the hubbub. But I must say this: For all those times that I took the perpetually crammed MRT, no one ever reeked of underarm odor or screamed theft.

At Shaw Boulevard I got off, lined up, fed Ate Glo again to the machine and exited---- but where? Faced with stairs and walls, I was clueless on where to go and whom to follow because people went in all directions. Take it easy, I told myself, to get out of this station, I simply have to take the stairs going down, right? Wrong! At the Shaw Boulevard Station, first you have to go up twice then go down before you could get out of the terminal. Whew!

I then headed for SM Megamall in a polo shirt that was so crinkled it looked like a bull had used it for a diaper. I’m not complaining but what you gain in MRT time, you lose in poise and style.

Retracing my steps to the MRT terminal three hours later, I jiggled once in a while the coins in my pocket, the exact fare going home. But up there, I was astonished to see that the supposed express line for “exact fare only” was longer by half than the rest. Ha-ha. Extreme mind conditioning makes people funny!

It was 9 PM and the crowd hadn’t thinned out much. Thinking that about this time gender lines were no longer hallowed, I went to an area where the crowd was relatively sparse. But then the train arrived and the usual mad scramble ensued.

Elbowing my way inside, I latched my hand on the rail to gain space and balance. It was only later when I realized I was being bumped from all sides by fleshy orbs. I looked around and saw, pressed close to me, women in various stages of pregnancy. Coyly, a woman smiled and pointed to me a sign on the wall that read: FOR PREGNANT PASSENGERS ONLY.

As the MRT door swished and shut me out, I wished I had stuffed under my shirt everything that I bought.