There’s nothing that makes you stand out more in a foreign country than your big-ass, stupid-ass backpack. This is something I have struggled with on more than one occasion: the icy, curious stares of silent locals, their sneering looks loosely translated from body language as various disdainful epithets, wordlessly screaming “foreigner” and “tourist” over the loudly accelerating bus engine, everyone’s bodies swaying in unison to the bumps in the road.
The babushka in her natural habitat
If that’s not bad enough, apparently the rest of the world didn’t get the memo that people take more than just themselves on buses. All over Eastern Europe, buses are tiny clown cars filled to the brim with jostling old ladies in housecoats and old lady shoes who are sure to roll their eyes the minute you move next to them with that cancerous tumor of clothes and living supplies strapped to your back. A far cry from the decadent, spacious, Western transports fully equipped to house an army of rolling Samsonite foot soldiers. And you know that’s what the old ladies are thinking.
Please don’t lift up your arm…
Hell, if you happen to be in one of those buses, you’re goddamn lucky. Witness the horror that is the “marshrutka”: some dude brings his Nissan van, vaguely resembling my childhood family car that was factory recalled at least 6 times for being a mobile death trap, and then he sticks a handwritten placard in the front with some street names on it and vaguely follows a circular route. He charges you for it, but it’s probably not enough money to support his cigarette habit.
And thank God for that addiction. The tarry aroma so thick you would swear that the cigarettes were dipped in dark pitch brewed in deep, unknown corners of Siberia’s pine forests is a welcome concealer of the hot, sweaty odors emanating from your fellow passengers. If fortune smiles on you, you might catch a fleeting blast of fresh air blowing in from the window, the comforting few drops of seawater dripped on a beached whale.
So here I am, hugging my backpack tight on my lap and trying not to brush the arm of the babushka sitting next to me. Her exasperated sighs at the bad luck of sitting next to the tourist with the potato sack on his lap are already starting to piss me off. I’ve just sat down, and I tried to forego any problems by sitting at the way front of the van, just behind the driver. Apparently I just made things harder for myself…
A surly-looking guy wearing a dingy, red tracksuit and a nose so big and red that someone probably punched it three seconds before I got on, looks me right in the eyes and reaches out his hand to me. He’s holding something, and due to my lack of reaction, he starts impatiently jiggling his out-stretched closed fist at me. Finally I reach out my hand because it just seems like the thing to do, and he drops three greasy coins into my hand and cocks his head quickly towards the driver, maintaining his steely boxer’s gaze.
I get it. I throw the coins into the little wicker basket next to the driver. Suddenly the rest of the passenger’s pockets burst open like I had just yelled, “Stick ‘em up!”, as, one by one, people pass me their coins from their coats and I relay them on to the basket. My heart starts to swoon with pride, like the first day on the playground that you’re not the last to be picked for kickball. I feel included, I feel like the water molecule absorbed into the cell membrane through the effortless process of osmosis, my entrance into this closed circle a result of an imbalance, a genuine necessity for my presence within it.
She really wants that sexy margarita
No, this was not some grand gesture of amity and understanding. This was me being in a place that has its own rules, different from mine, and no one around me cares, or even knows, about my different system. They would marvel at coins being dropped into a machine at the front of the bus, the way Tarzan would marvel at some simple technology like a music box, brought by an Englishman into the jungle in one of those old movies: as the dial is cranked and the first tinny notes of a song squeeze out, Tarzan would jump with a wounded yelp and run to hide behind a bush, his big, frightened eyes peering suspiciously out of the darkness between the palm fronds.
They knew I didn’t fit but I was going to be forced to fit.
Lesson learned: Expect to be expected to adapt to your surroundings.
–Denis (France), 26, Somewhere on the bus in Kazan, Russia