With its gray marble floors, cream walls and signals still with their rounded corners and washed solid colors. Mexico city’s subway stations are a space where time never passed by. There, it is forever 1968.
There is a tunnel to go under the tracks out into the other side of the street, or into the other direction of the line. An empty escalator goes forever up as we descended on the stairs, acompanied only by the sound of a bicycle chime being activated again and again, “chin chin chin”. A woman wearing her official cleaning service uniform in orange and gray (like the subway’s colors), with a low, long ponytail kept up by a black scrunchy walks in front of us anxiously holding her hands to her chest and looking from side to side, she is not fleeting, she is just, well anxious.
The chime keeps on filling the hallway “chin, chin, chin” in which steps are barely audible from our’s and the woma’s plastic soles. As we reach the other side an old person is sleeping. Also wearing the cleaning service uniform with his grayed head in between his or her arms restinting over his legs at the top of the stair case. Only the four of us populate this lonely wide space meant to give way to hundreds of chilangos at a time. We turn left at the top and the long haired woman disapears into another lonely hallway finally gaining confidence to glimpse back at us. We move forward, turn right and climb a final staircase, flanked by a group of subway vendors talking to each other, into the noisy street. Its Friday so people drink “Dos Equis” in the street and listen to cumbia as loud as possible at the taco stand.