I took the escalators down to the subway at Foggy Bottom on a very hot day. It was early afternoon, not rush hour, and there was just a moderate number of people in the station.
I was moving quickly to reach a particular area of the platform before the next train would arrive. Then I almost lost my step, almost stopped completely, when I saw a middle-aged, casually-dressed man sitting on a bench doing something I'd never seen before inside metro.
Now I must pause to say that open food containers are not allowed in the subway system but sometimes you'll see someone eating French fries or even a sandwich and usually they eat while somewhat secluded inside a train car.
But this guy had two large containers positioned close to him on the bench and he held one big spoon. One container was clear plastic and inside was a "piece" of chocolate cake with chocolate icing and this "piece" was about as large as half of an entire cake. The other container was a half-gallon of vanilla ice cream, not a pint or a quart. No, it was an enormous half of a gallon.
With gusto, he would scoop out a bite of cake and eat it and then scoop out a substantial portion of ice cream and eat that next. And this process was repeated at a rather quick pace.
Maybe he was hungry. Or maybe he didn't want the ice cream to melt!
He seemed in his own world. Oblivious. Happy.
I couldn't imagine making a spectacle of myself that way and yet no one on the platform seemed to express any surprise. I tried to not react either, although I did surreptitiously watch him devour his food as I walked along.
Once I got over my initial suprise at seeing this scene, I was almost in awe.
It's not that I'd want to eat enormous amounts of food like that, and especially not inside a dirty metro station. And I wouldn't want to contribute to the vermin problem in the bowels of metro by dropping any scraps of food.
But it must be nice to just do really weird things in public and not care what anyone else thinks.
In any case, it's entertaining to witness scenes like this. It certainly gave me something to think about on my ride home.