The wheels on ...

There is a bus stop 100m from my front door but I have never used it to catch a bus.  In the 6 and a half years I have been living in New Zealand, I caught the bus for the first time last month and it wasn't even my local bus, it was in Christchurch.  I had no access to a car and the bus was the easiest way to get into town so on I hopped.  

What struck me first was the silence.  Here I was on a bus travelling with maybe 20 other people and it was eerily quiet.  No-one was speaking, there was no interaction, most people had their heads down looking at phones.  Having spent my youth on buses going to secondary school and then to college, the quiet made me sad.  My memory of past bus journeys feels like there was always the background noise of people talking.  The students debating where the cheapest pints could be found, the aul' ones discussing who had died, friends dissecting the night before and who said what to whom.  "She didn't!  She did!!!".  A wealth of entertainment for the casual eavesdropper.   

Now don't get me wrong, there were journeys where talking was the last thing on my mind.  I vividly remember a Russian Roulette trip home after the night before's double tequila shots threatened to make a reappearance.  Interesting side note, double shots do not go down all in one go and tequila is evil.  I'm sure as a student there were also many times I put my headphones on and passed the journey home in anti-social silence.  

If I was travelling by bus every day, chances are I would switch off from the outside world too.  It's probably just rose tinted nostalgia that has me fondly remembering the bus journeys of 25 years ago.  On my last day in Christchurch, I caught the bus back to the hotel.  I had been walking round all day, I was tired and hungry and not entirely sure which stop was mine.  Two teenage schoolgirls got on and proceeded to chat the entire journey about school, which teachers they liked, what they were going to do at the weekend and just like that, I was back on the bus to Kill with my faith in the bus going citizens of the world restored.