Fairground Attraction

The fairground holds a strange attraction to children and adults alike.  Is it the lights?  Or perhaps the exhilarating shrieks of fellow fair-goers?  I think it is the invigorating experience felt by each individual.
 
Yesterday I lived through a rather energising experience similar to attending a fairground.  I commuted on the Gautrain for the first time since it launched in 2011.
 
Walking from the parking area to the entrance of the Sandton station with my husband, I felt like a little girl again.  Suddenly I had two golden locks hanging on each side of my head, holding his hand in admiration.  I looked at him as I jogged to keep up with his strides.  I was proud to have him by my side and felt safe because I knew he always knew best and what to do next.
 
Clutching my bag underneath my arm, I walked through the turnstile after swiping the access card, holding my breath as I could see how those glass sliding doors would cut me in half if I didn't walk fast enough.  Once through the gate, I held onto his hand as he led me to the platform.
 
I remember looking around in awe.  It was as if I walked into a movie.  The platform was everything one sees in movies.  Security guards standing around, and commuters sitting with headphones that seem to be getting bigger as audio players get smaller.  Some commuters are reading the newspaper, and others are fixated on the screens of their handheld devices. I closed my eyes, and for a moment, I was somewhere else ... Paris perhaps?
 
All of a sudden, the wind came out of nowhere.  It whistled in my ears, and I looked around in panic.  If this was a movie, someone would surely fall onto the track, and the train would stop inches away. Who would be the hero to stop the train in time? I took a step back.  Maybe it was two.  "How much time do we have to get onto the train?" I asked my husband.  "Perhaps a minute," he replied. I imagine him stepping on the train and it departing before I get a chance to board.  My heart started racing, and I could feel the perspiration on my forehead.  
 
I held his hand tighter and almost stepped on his heels as I followed him into the car.  Yes, apparently, that is what it is called.  "Can I sit by the window?" I asked.  He laughed.  "Sure, my darling," he said with a smile.  The train started moving, but I did not hear the clickety-clack I associated with a moving train as a child. I was slightly disappointed, to say the least, but the next moment I felt my stomach stay behind as the train took off at full speed.  I remember giggling like a teenager on Valentine's Day until the train stopped at the Rosebank station three minutes later.  After a couple of seconds, it started moving again, and the giggling returned spontaneously.
 
When it stopped at our destination - Park station - three minutes later, I was excited.  As I stepped out onto the platform, I was back in that movie and couldn't believe I would experience Paris at last. Up the escalators to the main entrance that would take us into the streets of the most romantic city in the world.  Gone was the child, and I was 26 again - in love with the big man with the voice of an angel.  Holding his hand, I looked up at him and remembered our first kiss.  I remember our beach wedding- both barefoot, clinging onto each other as the wind threatened to blow us out to sea.  Through the turnstile I go, walking towards the sunshine.
 
No Eiffel Tower.  No French accents.  No romantic street cafes.  I shook my head once, maybe twice, to bring myself back to reality and looked up to the man I loved with all my heart as I took his hand.  As we walked the streets of Hillbrow, I could not help but wonder what Johannesburg was like in the nineteenth century.  I wondered what it was like when my grandfather was a young man in the 1940s.  I marvelled at what it must have been like in the 1970s.  And I cried at what it had become.  
 
There is no fairground attraction in the city we call Johannesburg.