Cultural Encounters: Train Ride

At its most fundamental level, a culture can be explained as a group of people sharing several unifying characteristics.  In that sense, a culture can be found just about anywhere. I happened to find one on a train; the 4:47 p.m. Port Jervis bound NJ-Transit commuter one to be exact.

The train ride home from a day of school is hardly the place for one to expect to find a unique ‘culture,’ but lo-and-behold, one was unquestionably present in the back car in which I sat last Thursday night. Initially expecting a quiet ride home, I was most definitely surprised that once the train left the station, it seemed to awaken with a newfound vigor amongst everyone onboard. Chatter began and conversations took place not between a few people, but the entire train car, and seemingly everyone had something to add onto the topic at hand, whether it be the Yankees’ win that afternoon or the impending hurricane Earl; and as each speaker changed, one thing stood out to me the most: they all knew each other’s names.

Now this may be something that only I find to be noteworthy, but one good look at the bunch heading home from work that day would force you to realize that nowhere else in the world would that group of people be conversing with one another, let alone playing cards or talking about family. To say that they were “ethnically” diverse, would truly be an understatement as the car was diverse in many more ways; one look would yield a train filled with everyone from businessmen in suits, to construction workers in dirty bright orange vests and they all were friendly with one another.

Off of the train, each person no doubt leads completely different lives from one another, however it struck me that no matter how different each person is, regardless of race, income, or occupation, each day they spend 80 minutes or so together with their good friends, each other, who they happened to find by chance heading home from work each weekday from New York City.