When I took the bus down to South Carolina on Monday the craziness of the whole ordeal got me talking to some of the passengers. I sat next to a woman named Robin. She was on her way back to Atlanta from Maine, where she had just buried her mother. She was an older woman, but she had no home and was staying with her son. She used to have a husband and a steady job, but she divorced him a few years ago, and then was laid off. Suffice to say, she had seen better times. I told her about what I was doing and the farm job I had lined up. She said she had been thinking of doing something like that, but she didn't know where to look. I gave her the WWOOF website and told her that it was worth the $20. She seemed excited and I hope she uses it. Who knows, maybe I'll bump into her again. I'm a little annoyed with myself for not getting her email address.
I am now back on a Greyhound bus. I'm heading back to Richmond to see Cory for a second and then leave for NY on a Chinatown bus at 1am. This Greyhound experience has been a lot like the last one, in that it sucks. The bus took off thirty minutes late, but this was understandable because the weather was pretty bad. We were running about an hour behind when the bus suddenly turned around 60 miles north of our last stop, Greensboro, NC. One of the passengers had gone up to the front of the bus, talked to the driver, and without explanation, the bus turned around. Finally one of the other passengers asked what the hell was going on. The driver told us he was going back to Greensboro to drop off that passenger that he had been talking to, and then we would turn back and drive straight to Richmond without making any stops. He expected we would get there on time, which should have been 5:20pm.
When we got back to Greensboro he dropped that passenger off at a rental truck place, not the bus stop. If I had known this bus was actually a cab maybe I would have asked to be taken to the Bronx instead. Lame. I have no idea why that guy did not get off the bus the first time we were in Greensboro, or what he said to the driver that made him turn around and drive back an hour and drop someone off at a place that was not even a real bus stop. It is now 5:50 and it has started raining again. We're not in Richmond. We're not even in VA yet.
The one good thing that has happened because of all this is that suddenly everyone on the bus is chatting with one another. The three people in front of me were talking about conspiracy theories for hours and have just changed to relationship advice. The people in the back of the bus are playing music. This young dude in a leather jacket walked up to me while at a rest stop and said something I could not understand. I asked him to repeat it and I still couldn't understand it. I was worried that it was his accent and I really didn't want to be a jerk about it. I told him that I was sorry, but I could not understand him. He said "Oh, I'm sorry, you don't speak Russian? I thought you did." I laughed it off. Now I would like to know what it was that he said, but he is several rows in front of me, talking to the elderly southern woman next to him. Maybe he's getting off in Richmond and I'll have time to ask him about it while I wait for Cory.
I wonder what made him think I spoke Russian? I know people often try to place my heritage, but no one has ever assumed I spoke another language based solely on what I look like. Interesting.
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