We're all a Bit Crazy on This Bus

In five months riding the bus, so far I've only seen one serious crazy -- an emaciated little guy with blonde hair and thick black glasses (not the hip kind) who was shouting at another guy to "stop staring at me, look the other way right now" and "what are you, some kind of homo?" (This guy was definitely not au courant with Portland P.C. Speak)...Everyone else looked in the other direction...

It could be the route - 54/56 through Hillsdale, so there aren't a lot of seriously whacked-out types you normally see on city buses...but it could be that Portlanders are often painfully polite so in general, there's just less rowdiness...I'm definitely going to start taking other buses to other parts of the city to explore this thought.

A new Bus Friend
I made a friend on the bus - he's a PSU grad student majoring in finance from Kashgar, China...he noticed me on the bus with my Turkish flash cards and we started talking, because his language (Uygur) is in the same family as Turkish. Like me, he has real issues with the Chinese political system (totalitarian, to put it plainly) and I don't think he wants to go back, except for his family there. Turns out he only lives a block from me, so he came over to dinner.

Makes me realize how all around me live people who have amazingly wonderful/painful/sad/rich/lonely lives...I may even have a relative living nearby and not know it...makes me also realize how incredibly isolated so many of us are...

Some Other Faces on the Bus
I'm starting to see some regulars:

1. The knitting lady - she has a cart to drag all her knitting, a circular needle wrapped around her neck so she can keep knitting, even when boarding the bus, bags and bags of yarn in the cart and a very weird lopsided knitted hat. Doesn't talk too much. Knits a lot. Fast.

2. The "talker" - this woman talks non-stop to the driver from the minute she gets on to her stop -- she's still talking as she gets off the bus. I think she may be one of the Lonely Bus People.

3. The hard-core bus guy -- sold his car "and it was a really nice one" and now commutes entirely by bus. If he wants to take a trip, he gets a ride from friends or rents a car. He figures he's saving a lot of money this way, and he never, ever has to deal with city traffic.