riding the bus with me pt.1

Waiting for the bus after work is pure torture. You got no idea when is the bus coming. All you can do is wait and pretend it doesn’t bother you. After a while you get a little giddy from inhaling all those exhaust fumes. The already polluted air is bad enough thank you very much. Without you realizing or able to do anything about it, you started doing the “left & right” dancing steps because you couldn’t feel your legs anymore. Then, you’re positively sure your expensive high heels will be the cause of your death and wondered if it’s worth it to spend so much to feel this much of physical pain.

Finally the bus comes and it is overloaded with passengers that the only place available is the rooftop. So you hold your breath and you squeeze yourself in. FYI, public buses are nothing like sardines cans. Unlike the public bus, there’s a specific ration of sardines in every can. But for the public buses, the number of passengers is determined by the driver’s mood, or by the shapes and sizes of the passengers. I swear sometimes it feels as if the bus driver lets the whole KL population board the bus.

Now, in my 18 years of experience taking the public buses, I have never got on a bus where the bus driver is courteous or sane. I have seen people caught in between the automatic doors because the bus driver just shut the door without checking if all his passengers are safely tucked inside the bus. Those poor people were already clinging on the door handle for their dear life and the bus driver had to crush them with the doors. It is quite funny when you think about it now, but I know it was a painful experience. It happened to me too. No, I wasn’t stuck between the doors (thank goodness for that!), but my bag did. Half of it was inside the bus, and the other half was sticking out. I tried to pull it in, but it was impossible because the bus was too full for me to even move. To make things more dramatic, it rained. It was funny, and I wasn’t upset or anything and I pretended it was nothing out of the ordinary. The other passengers around me were amused and one of them tried to pull my bag in for me. I went home that day with a bag that is half wet.