Since I have mostly been using the metro and not riding on buses, I have had to make most of my observations of DC bus drivers from the pedestrian perspective. This past weekend, however, I finally rode on a few buses. Last Thursday I rode the bus to Georgetown and back. I was impressed by the skill with which the drivers deftly maneuvered the buses in and out of traffic and around all the parked cars and everything.
Then on Saturday I took Greyhound from DC to Baltimore to have dinner with Dwight and Jennifer for their anniversary. Before leaving DC, the bus driver got up and gave a speech about the rules on the bus, keeping cellphone conversations quiet, picking up the trash, no lewd behavior or inappropriate conversations. He then proceeded to offer sort of a short sermon, or a long blessing/prayer for the bus, the passengers, and the voyage before us. He ended by saying something about how he loves each and every one of us like his own family and that we will all have failures in our lives, but that failure makes us stronger human beings. Here I thought I was just taking a simple 45-minute bus ride up the highway, but this guy made me start to wonder if perhaps I was getting myself into something much more than that.
The bus ride ended up being pretty uneventful. The driver did run over one curb as we were heading out of town, however. He also was listening to his iPod the whole time and talking on his cellphone a fair bit as well, which seemed pretty inappropriate to me.
In other news, I had my first interview yesterday. I think it went well, but it's always hard to know for sure how it really went. They said that they won't be making any decisions for about 2 weeks. Yesterday I also saw a fairly important international figure. I was about to cross a street downtown when some motorcycle cops came and blocked off the intersection for a motorcade. I looked down the block to see if the motorcade was coming and I saw that they were just parked on the other side of the street and there was a crowd of people there. So I moseyed over there to take a look just in case it happened to be someone REALLY famous. When people started getting in their cars I couldn't recognize anyone, and then a cameraman standing nearby said it was the Turkish Prime Minister, so no wonder I didn't recognize him. This morning he was in the news though, here's a BBC article about his meeting with Bush. Anyway, it was still kind of cool.
2 comments:
Did you happen to notice whether that bus driver had anything unusual strapped around his torso or anything?
Oh man! Too bad you didn't know about this Bus Driver "task" (for lack of a better term) while you were still driving. But considering the number of stops and the short route, you would have been doing a lot of preaching to tourists... however it probably would have been a good way to fill up the time on some of those slow days...
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