Janet Adams         FIRST IN FIRST OUT   

  Mini bus routes are flexible here in Yemen. The destination of the first person who gets on the bus determines the route handy! I was taking a bus to the Sheraton Hotel the other day to use the gym there and I was told I would have to take two busses, changing to a second route. The first bus stopped and I was the last passenger to get off. I indicated to the driver that I wanted the bus to the Sheraton Sheraton I am shrugging my shoulders dabab (bus)??? He shrugged HIS shoulders then motioned for me to get back on and he took me to the hotel. Customized bus route not bad.  - October 2005      Janet Adams in Yemen    

                                                                                 romerican                     Taking the bus

In the US, the traditional way to pay for metro bus fare is when you board the vehicle. You enter only from the front door near the driver, not the rear door. If you have a pre-paid monthly pass, you swipe it. Otherwise, you put cash into the collection device until it beeps happily. Exact change preferred.

Pretty simple, eh? Get on the bus. Pay.

The potential for any fiduciary shenanigans is severely curtailed by the absence of human exchange. Your bus pass was prepaid on the internet. If you’re paying cash, you toss coins into a machine that rapidly counts the total value. Ding!

Now, I walked you through that for the sake of contrast.

In Romania, the foreigner is often puzzled by the rituals of public transportation.

Tiny, non-descript signs indicate bus stops, though non-locals will never see such signs. The best bet for a traveler is to locate any large collection of loitering citizens. They’re either hitchhiking or waiting for a bus. Either way, it involves wheels.

If it does turn out to be a bus stop, the ride protocol initiates with jostling in close proximity. Children will rush between your legs. Grown men will shove you from behind. Old women will step on your feet as they slip past you in the shuffle. It’s all out combat as the bus rolls to a stop.

Tourists may note, between pinballesque shovings, there are multiple fronts in the war. Any place which might conceivably be a door is bumrushed by the crowds. Front, back, even center if the bus has 3 doors. Any port is fair game.

The primary objective of those outside the bus is to block any passengers from exiting the vehicle. By not letting any people get off the bus, entrants hope to claim a free seat.

Sound backwards? Not really. There is a tactical imperative to the strategy of obstruction. The bunicas, who prove Darwin’s theories by standing point guard on the surging would-be riders, communicate telepathically in order to coordinate a simultaneous backward lean.

Having been given 4 to 6 mm of leeway, the outbound passengers stampede ashore with the force of their exist knocking back the throngs of boarding people. A mosh pit breaks out as the two sides seasaw back and forth.

When the majority of debarked (that’s right! not everyone makes it off successfully), then the chaos flops forward precariously. They key is to leap in the air about a half meter from the bus, just in time for the people behind you to give you a good thrust. The resulting trajectory should arc you more or less inside the autobus.

Don’t bother looking for seats. There’s no way you had the experience or stamina to manhandle the cattle necessary to claim victory. They’re all taken. Age and gender and civility have no place here. First come, first serve. We have communism to thank for this equality.

Of course, you won’t be quite the last to board. When the driver grinds the transmission into a crunchy first gear, the ancient beast belches its’ displeasure and lurches forward under the strain of being overburdened.

You’ll notice the doors don’t necessarily close prior to motion as it makes good sport for passengers to bet on which of the persons running down the block in your general direction might have the athletic ability to fling themselves at the moving target and find some edge to dig their fingers nails into to keep from falling out to their death.

Alas, the show comes to an end. Collect your winnings or pay your debts, accordingly. We move onto the next stage: the realization you’ve been outfoxed by the clever folks on the side of the bus who do not have 4000 degrees of solar heat magnified by window glass. You’ll learn to appreciate the scientific process of maximum cloth saturation as you sweat like şaorma on the spit.

Click, click. Turn and notice most of the adults (not teens) are sliding ribbons of paper into a mechanical hole punch. Ah, self validation of their tickets. The honesty system, in effect. Afterall, the odds of being caught by the wily and elusive ticket inspector on one of his/her rare trips aboard the bus are slim to none. Next to impossible.

Panic! You didn’t buy a ticket, did you, foreigner?

“Ticket?”

Oh, yeah… no one told you how that works. See, in random locations scattered throughout the city (but never where you happen to be) are invisible salespersons selling tickets through portals from the 5th Dimension. Your challenge is sense the magnetic disturbance in the air caused by the presence of undetectable bus ticket kiosks, then take the inverse derivative of the cosign value of relative variance from the mean which will give you the WGS84 latitude…

Right. So teens sneak on the bus knowing they’re unlikely to get into trouble. Adults tend to pay for tickets out of some sense of civic duty. No order is really enforced or promoted. Your crime of being born elsewhere will result in your being a public transportation scofflaw in a foreign land.

What a jerk, you’ve become. You and all the rest of the disrespectiful tourists from just about any other part of the world. Worthless as a dog’s fleas leeching off the rest of society.

Travel tip: Wanna get around town easily and cheaply? Look for any dark box bearing an unspectacular sign with the word RAT in blue. Find that RAT and you’ve found the magical happyland where tickets are sold. Now, if you don’t speak Romaneste at all, buying said tickets will be the most entertaining aspect of your bus experience. romerican
 

                    romanian poll on public transport in Bucharest

MORE

You only missed …the thieves working the buses in twos and threes. And I’ll have you know you are enjoying new replacements in the bus fleet these days. And some of them are pretty empty, nights, so you can actually get a seat.  frank

You’re terribly mistaken to say that age, gender or civility have no place in the public transport services of the Balkans. Haven’t you seen the ever present group of old ladies cursing, swearing and threatening their way into a seat? That’s civility in action (Balkan civility, that is)! The bus-stop-stampede also has a set of clear and immutable rules - the same, ever present “group of old ladies” forms a thick, impenetrable wall right along the expected stopping position of the bus. Then, in a military like operation, after the bus stops, they storm the bus, trying to capture any and all available seats, proclaiming themselves as Rulers of Public Transport. And, since they own the Free Senior Pass, and because they are really bored at home, and since they need a place to hold their lengthy debates, the group tends to stay on those seats for 1-2 hours, while the bus makes its runs, transporting the sweaty (standing) masses back and forth. Afterward, happy of their rush-hour-conquests, they leave the bus.
If getting caught by the nasty controlor, do like (some) Romanians do. Put on a “fake” accent, say “Nu vorbeste romaneste” while handing a 5 lei bill to the controlor. That should fix it. The other way would involve the even more common “naşule, nu putem rezolva altcumva” approach, and a similar 5 lei bill.
Oh, and most teens don’t click-clack their tickets since they get the subsidized “abonamente” passes. They are the typical target of the mean controlor, when they manage to squeeze past the old “ladies”.
But at least, some places in Romania (like Bucharest) bought new, air conditioned buses and trolleybuses… You should see the relics that are used in lieu of buses in places like Ruse, or even Sofia. Mikail

Bucuresti has some new buses. And they are great. However, you cannot compare the capital of Romania to a decrepit border town of Ruse. It’s completely out of proportion. Sofia, on the other hand, has an armada of new buses and the boarding experience remains relatively organized: a clear victory. romerican

 

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2007
                                                               123 I Love You     All the Difference

Every day I take the bus home. Sometimes it’s the 4 pm bus, and other days it’s the 4:30 bus. I challenge you to find two men on Planet Earth who are more different than the drivers of these two buses. In case you’re interested, the first driver just might be the Devil.

If I ever make a movie about WWII, I will want the 4 o’clock driver to play the role of a sadistic concentration camp commandant. Everything this man does – every word, every gesture – shows his need to let passengers know how infuriated he is about having to drive a bus for the rest of his life.

His muttered words are always in a low monotone, and his accent is Eastern European – an accent which, to me, has always had a sinister feel to it. When I mount the steps of his bus every day, I find him sitting back in his chair, sneering, with his arms folded across his chest. He never takes my ticket until the last possible moment, so, when I’m holding it out, it always feels like I’m challenging him. It feels like I’m poking him in the chest and saying, “C’mon. You too pussy to fight me?” I’m never completely sure that I’m going to be able to board the bus without getting my ears boxed. This guy’s bad vibes alone could put me on life-support.

I should also point out something else that is unsettling: his hands make me hungry. It’s as weird as it sounds. His fingers are fat and pink, and every digit looks like a freshly made chipolata. But don’t be misled. As delicious as they might seem, these are hands that are capable of performing incredible, maybe Herculean feats – like bending pieces of steel or committing unspeakable deeds in the depths of a Serbian forest.

This man never takes a passenger’s ticket without issuing some kind of order.

You shouldn’t fold it like that.

Hand it to me this way. Not that way.

No hat on my bus.

Then, if everything is in perfect order, he’ll submit the ticket to close scrutiny – to make sure that it’s not counterfeit, expired, or already punched. He acts as if the general public were a thief hoping to pull a fast one on him.

It’s no different on the road. He doesn’t drive the bus. He brandishes it like a weapon to menace the drivers around him. His road etiquette is a hate crime. He is constantly slamming his massive hand on the horn. At at least five points during every trip I fully expect him to snap – to scream out “I can’t fucking take it anymore!!!” and to jerk the wheel, crash through the guardrail, and conduct me and the rest of the passengers off the overpass and into oblivion. If you ever read about this kind of thing happening, you’ll know it’s him.

Then there’s the driver of the 4:30 bus. I don’t know if I like him because he looks like an elderly Hunter S. Thompson (complete with sunglasses), or if it’s because, when he is driving the bus, it doesn’t just feel like he’s driving me from point A to point B, but instead it feels like he’s driving…my frickin’ soul. To paradise.

Did that get weird for you? Maybe you thought it was weird, or a man-crush – but that’s because you’ve never met him. If you met him, you would feel exactly as I do. You would agree with me that, when we die, if we have to take some form of public transportation to get to the pearly gates, this guy will be the operator. And he will accept transfers.

His bus is a haven of warmth in winter. When he pulls in to pick us up, we never have to wait around in the snow while he checks in at the station. His first priority is always to get us out of the cold. The public is not his enemy.

His bus is retro. In a newly purchased fleet of models that are sleek and efficient and new, his is the only survivor of the old days. There’s no PA, and the seat coverings are worn and outdated, but the atmosphere inside is somehow cozier. More inviting.

Hunter doesn’t just snatch-check-punch your tickets when you get in, either. He looks at you. If you’ve ridden with him more than once, he greets you in a way that let’s you know he remembers you. When he smiles at you, you start to realize how few people really know how to smile. We’ve all been tricked by yellow happy faces to believe that a smile is an act performed with the mouth. It isn’t. The mouth has nothing at all to do with it.

When you board his bus, he’ll never try to pass off a trite greeting. Instead, he’ll say something like, “Hey man. I was thinking it was Wednesday, but someone told me it was Tuesday and I nearly crapped myself.” It’s always something different. Always hilarious. When I get off he never says, “Have a nice day.” Today, for example, he said, “All right friend, I’ll be catching up with you tomorrow.” I’m not his friend, and we won’t have anything to catch up on tomorrow, but after riding with him out of the city, most people probably feel like they have just finished catching up with an old friend.

(OK. I admit. It’s a man-crush.)

Since there’s no PA system, before each trip Hunter has to stand in front of the passengers and announce the schedule. He’s friendly and funny, and he speaks with a gleam in his eye. Even though I’m about to take the same route with the same stops that I’ve taken every day for the past three months, it’s different because he’s the driver. We’re in a new land, off to see exotic places. We’re in the magic bus.
Folks, here we are, and where are we? Let me tell you. It's 4:30 plus change, and pretty soon we’re going to be rolling down the highway. Traffic’s good today, so you can be sure of getting to your destination at the right time. You know the stops, so I don’t have to repeat ‘em.

The only thing I will say is, when you’re done, I need you to check under your seats and make sure you don’t forget those things that are important to you. I know, I know. I’m like a naggin’ mother. Ha. But who knows. Maybe one day you’ll thank me for it. Anyway, sit back, relax, and we’ll have you home in no time at all.

I don’t know about you, but I think this compares favorably with the surly grunt that the first driver gives when we he puts his bus in gear.
Both of these drivers are about the same age. They take the same strip of highway every day, half an hour apart. They make exactly the same stops.

How is it, then, that they have arrived at such different places in their lives?

Don’t forget those things that are important to you.

I hope I never do.
123 I Love You