Public transport is not for sissies

Continued from previous post...

So there I am, on the bus, about to reach for my iPod, when a woman gets on. There are seats available, but she ignores all of them, and walks straight up to a guy sitting there minding his own business. He's in his late twenties, fairly nondescript, doesn't have a book or earphones - he's just sitting there daydreaming.

But she stalks right up to him and boy, does she look like someone peed in her Coco Pops.

I put my iPod away, wondering if this is a lovers' spat. She obviously knows him. She's very clearly pissed off. Maybe he slept with her and then didn't call her. Woo Hoo! I'm about to witness a telling-off of note. I silently cheer her on - this is clearly a woman who does not take shit.

This is how the conversation plays out:

Her: You must stop eating pea soup!

(Hmm, not what I was expecting at all. Okay, so he slept with her, ate all her pea soup and then didn't call her).

He looks at her blankly.

Her: That's why you're fat and bald. It's the pea soup! It's going to kill you one day. You'll be sitting there, staring out the window, and then bam! Dead! From the pea soup.

(I make a note to myself to Google the evils of pea soup).

He blinks in confusion and looks around to see if she might be squint, and actually not talking to him at all. But she then sticks her index finger in his face and wiggles it around menacingly. She's clearly talking to him.

Her: Peas are evil. Soup is bad. I keep telling you that you need vegetables, but soup is not a vegetable!

He finally speaks: I don't know what you're talking about. I don't even like peas.

Her: You bloody Asians. You're all liars with your bloody peas. Green is not a good colour on you!

(Now this is the interesting part. He is not Asian. She is. The plot thickens...)

He's now adopted a strategy of just ignoring her. So he turns his back to her, pretends there isn't some pissed off tiny Asian woman screaming her lungs out at him, and stares out the window. As Julia Roberts would say: Big mistake. Huge mistake. This only infuriates her even more. She ups her game and starts yelling at him about pumpkins and how orange does not taste good, but then what did he expect, as orange is close to red, and red is the worst of them all. And then she turns to the rest of us and informs us that we're all fat and ugly too, and shouldn't expect to live long because of our soup-eating proclivities.

She has gone too far. Another woman now gets up, and tells the angry Asian menace that she should just shut up, because no one wants to hear her crazy ranting.

Asian lady to other lady: You are discriminating against me because I'm black!

Other lady to Asian lady: You are not black.

Asian lady: Aha! You admit you would discriminate against me if I was black? You also eat too much soup.

Alas, the bus pulls up to my stop, so I'm destined to never find out if the other woman indeed eats too much soup, or how the whole thing plays out. I consider staying on the bus while it does its next half hour loop around our part of the city, but figure that's taking eavesdropping a tad too far.

I barely cross the block when I run into another bus parked on the side of the road with a fire truck and 3 ambulances next to it. The driver informs me that a passenger had a heart attack while on the bus. He looks at me blankly when I ask if the guy had been eating pea soup at the time. At least, the driver and their emergency services reacted quickly, and the guy is going to be fine.

I tell you, public transport is not for sissies. Neither is soup apparently.







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