Come back Ken, all is forgiven
I find taxis are very habit-forming. You buy some expensive item and hail a cab to transport it home securely one day, and the next thing you know you’re slinging another 24 cans of beer into your trolley every time you go to the supermarket, so as to justify riding home in comfort. Or maybe that’s just me.
Anyway, having trudged round Shopping Recife (there’s a reason why you’ve never heard the phrase ‘imaginatively-named mall’) on yet another fruitless search for speakers for my laptop the other day, I had nothing to show for it and resolved to take the bus home. This is always a bit risky, as I don’t know enough place names to be sure of where they are going based on what they say on the front panel. However, this one said ‘Airport’, which is about five minutes away from me, so I thought I was pretty safe.
What I wanted to avoid was having to ask someone, and then getting into a long conversation which would end, as always, with me pretending to understand solely in order to extricate myself. I could have walked it in about ten minutes, but I’d walked a lot that day and was really tired.
Airport, my arse. A scenic two hours later, we pulled up not at the same bus-stop exactly, oh no. This bus-stop was *the other side* of the several-acre Shopping Recife complex. Imagine how I laughed when I realised that I had added not just two hours worth of time onto my ten-minute walk home, but also about a quarter of a mile.
Mind you, when I realised, after getting off the bus and managing not to shake my fist at its stupid self-satisfied rear end, that it would now actually be on its way to the airport, via my house, I nearly split my sides.
1 comment:
I know exactly what you mean!
There really is no way to tell where your destination is on these busses. Even when heading into a major bus terminal they don't see fit to, oh I don't know, put a sign up? The side where you walk in, now there's always a sign there. Unfortunatly when you're on THAT side you've already been in the place for a good few days so you bloody know where you are at that point.
The other way is to get off the bus when the correct amount of hours have passed to your destination. Unfortunatly punctuality does not seem to have a translation in Spanish so this doesn't work either.
The only other course of action is to sit in your chair looking jumpy hoping a local will take pity on you.
(Sorry for imense size of comment, I miss blogging. Unfortunatly I now have not much to say in one)
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