My bus ride the other night SUCKED. Big time. For a start, I waited 25 freaking minutes for one to come.
Hello STA?
It’s not like I was going anywhere obscure. It was 6.30pm and I was standing on the corner of Elizabeth & Park Streets in the city, heading to the eastern suburbs.
So, when one finally pulled up, it was pretty packed. I squished myself in and settled down for some quality iPad time.
A toddler started totally losing it. Full on tantrum. Which is pretty understandable at 6.30pm at night. Her parents kept trying to calm her down as she repeatedly screamed “My bag” (in garbled toddler speak) over and over and reached up to the parcel bit they have at the front of the bus for people’s bigger bags, including her floral backpack.
The parents kept saying, “No, you can’t stand up on the bus.”
I desperately wanted to say, “She just wants her bag, if you give it to her she might calm down.”
But not my place. It was a bit weird though. Did they not understand their own toddler’s garbled speak?
(Though fortunately the bus driver didn’t try to kick them off for being disruptive, like happened to a mum earlier in the week and which I wrote about on iVillage yesterday.)
Finally, they noisily departed the bus.
Then a bloke less than 30cm from me started vomitting into a small clear plastic bag. It was GROSS. All heaving and bubbling and graphic. I am not good with vomit. I tend to go out in sympathy. So I started to panic that I would begin to smell it at any moment and I didn’t have a plastic bag for mine.
His wife started apologising to everyone on the bus and explaining he had food poisoning. So naturally they decided to take crowded public transport (she didn’t say that bit). Always my first choice when spewing my guts up.
A few minutes later, they got off, him carrying his clear plastic bag of spew. I had a little heave when I accidentally looked at it.
Phew, I thought.
Then an Asian guy started doing this weird sinus clearing sound.
And THAT was the straw that broke the collective passengers’ back. Two girls beside him were all curled up to one side cringeing and giggling. And then an older bloke loudly (and quite rudely) asked him to stop making that terrible noise and did a demonstration to show what he meant.
Everyone in a two metre radius started nodding, smiling, laughing.
Felt quite sorry for the Asian bloke actually. It’s a cultural thing that he wouldn’t even notice he’s doing and he’d be mortified that he’d been told off about it.
But damn was I glad to get off that bloody bus 2 minutes later.
Tell me your horror bus experience.
housegoeshome 
Classic. I was on a bus once when an old man did an old man coughy throat clearing thing. A 15 year yelled: “cough it up!” Very rude, but still makes me chuckle years later
I find myself doing something similiar in my old age in the office … then thinking everyone is talking about me in the kitchen and how revolting it is to sit near me.
Your trip trumps my worse one in terms of intense sensory overload – all those awful sounds, sights and smell! (like you I have an aversion to vomit and mucus).
My own bad trip was when buses replaced trains on our line on the weekend…it made me utter the words, “I will never board a bus again in my entire life.”
I climbed onto this antique bus driven as it turned out by a maniac and clung to the back of the seat, tumbling over people sitting and standing, as it lurched all over the city picking up more and more people until we were pressed together in a horrible invasion-of-personal-space way. By train it takes 25 mins to get to the city from Oatley but this ghastly bus ride took an hour and a half,then terminated at Central. I ran all the way to the Opera House o meet my calm and smiling (yet puzzled) friend …but I made the play in time (just) 🙂
Sounds like the Night Bus in Harry Potter!