While waiting for the bus

I spend a lot of time on this trip waiting for buses. To get to lot of these national parks and other lovely sightseeing places, I have to wait for a bus that comes every hour or so. To be fair, most buses leave scrupulously on time, but sometimes --- as was the case this evening --- the bus doesn't appear as the schedule suggests it would. In tonight's case, it was only after asking for directions at various grocery stores, plus randomly overhearing an elderly Korean gentleman asking about the same bus, that I figured out I'd been waiting at the wrong place for the wrong bus. And that I had to wait an hour more for the right one to show up.

So I sat down and did some journalling instead.

The waiting does put a damper on things. It means I can't get to places as quickly as I'm used to (at home, I check the bus timings online obsessively before I get to a bus stop, so that I can already plan the quickest route), and there's a lot of downtime when, um, nothing happens. I suppose I oughta go with the zen and enjoy the fact that I'm not dashing from place to place, but sometimes I'm just itching to get on with it.

Sometimes, however, waiting isn't so uneventful. During one of today's hour-long waits: A mother arrived at the bus stop with her son, who's three or four years old. He started obsessively following around an older boy at the bus stop, the latter maybe eight or nine years old, and it turned out he wanted to try the orange drink the older boy was drinking. He got to try it, then he wanted to hold onto the drink (it was more than half-drunk by the older boy), and the older boy was like, whatever, you can have it.

So the mother and younger boy came back with the orange drink, at which point the boy's grandmother insisted on paying the other boy for the drink. Which set off this whole darting and ducking going on at one end of the bus stop, as the boy tried to decline the money but the grandmother kept stuffing it into his hand (or pocket).

The grandmother won, of course.

Meanwhile, I was still amazed that the mother allowed her son to drink from a stranger's cup. Cooties! Or something.

More buses (and waiting-for-buses) tomorrow. Which reminds me: I should go to sleep.