TEXT:

Three years in London had not changed Richard, although it had changed the way he perceived the city. Richard had originally imagined London as a gray city, even a black city, from pictures he had seen and was surprised to find it filled with color. It was a city of red brick and white stone, red buses and large black taxis, which were often, to Richard's initial puzzlement, gold or green or maroon, bright red post boxes, and green grassy parks and cemeteries.

When he had first arrived, he had found London huge, odd, fundamentally incomprehensible, with only the Tube map, that elegant, multi-colored, topographical display of underground railway lines and stations giving it any semblance of order. Gradually he realized that the Tube map was a handy fiction that made life easier, but bore no resemblance to the reality of shape of the city above. Like belonging to a political party, he thought once, proudly. And then having tried to explain the resemblance between the tube map and politics at a party to a cluster of bewildered strangers, he had decided in the future to leave political comment to others.