I like the Metro Blue Line

Saturday started out as a good day.  I played golf, the back nine with a good friend Dick Wittkop, and it was a glorious morning.  I birdied the first and last holes, won breakfast from Dick, all in all a good start to the day.  Chris and I had planned to go to the USC spring football scrimmage at the Coliseum slated to start at 3 o'clock.  She suggested we take the Metro line up there as it drops you off right at USC and a short walk across the street and you're there.  So we boarded the train at 1:30.

Now I loved taking the Metro when I was in culinary school.  Colorful characters, interesting scenery along the way.   It goes through the toughest areas of our fair city.  Compton, Watts, the Willowbrook district.  All the while you feel safe behind the thick glass and gleaming steel of the Blue Line.  On the weekends, seniors can ride one way for $.35 cents.  Awesome!  What we weren't told was that many of the stations along the route are under renovation.  We had to exit the train at Compton Station.  Ugh.  Then we had to catch an express metro bus that would drop us off at the Florence Station, four stations up the line.  Re-enter the Metro and speed our way up to downtown.

Chris said, lets just go back and get the car and drive.  Nope!  I was committed and besides, we had already paid our $.70 cents.  We boarded a big, long bus and then the people kept coming....and coming.  Standing room only.  Very young, very old, homeless, teens and every ethnicity.  Although, we were most definitely the minority.  What started out as an ok ride became a nightmare.  One girl was upset because people were "touching" her and she was yelling and swearing like a sailor.  Sitting behind us was her mother, who was coughing up a lung, kept telling her to shut up.  Chris offered the mother a cough drop, she took it and kept yelling at her daughter.  A teen high on something kept standing up and sitting down.  Removing and replacing his very dirty T-shirt and swearing.  N words were flying out of his mouth like machine gun fire.  This was not good.

We got to Florence and decided...lets go back and get the car.  We re-entered another bus that wasn't the express and stopped at the four stations we had passed coming up to the Florence station and it was worse.  Much worse.  Traffic was bad, people coming and going and again, we felt very much the minority.  Finally we got back to the Compton station and rode the train back to Wardlow station and picked up our car.  It was now 4 o'clock, two and one half hours later.

We went and had martini's and appetizers at a good restaurant, Delius, and read about the spring football scrimmage Sunday morning.

I used to like the Metro Blue Line.