Twice a week, I ride two buses to my internship in suburban Maryland. They are both consistently punctual and clean. There is enough room for me to sit, usually without a seatmate. The drivers are pleasant, stopping at my indicated intersection and waiting until I completely deboard the bus before driving on. And I cannot think of a more miserable or mundane way to travel.
I spent my summer studying and working in Santiago de Chile, a wintry, gray, polluted city without central heating and with poor street drainage. I lived in one of the wealthiest communities and worked in one of the poorest, traveling between work and home in the humblest form of public transit, the microbus. Micros are small, yellow, diesel-powered buses that run 23 hours a day. They are dirty, confusing, inefficient, crowded, loud and my favorite part of life in Santiago. My commute to and from work lasted four hours, and I grew to love every jolting gear-shift of it.
Micro drivers work very long hours with no breaks and little security. They are paid not by the hour, but by the number of passengers they pick up. This financial arrangement makes for an erratic schedule of stops. The drivers will slow down at nearly every corner, opening their doors and pausing if a prospective passenger flags them down.
Convincing drivers to let you off once you’ve boarded can be more complicated. Each bus has a different system for informing the driver of your desired destination—some have strings to pull similar to those found in Washington D.C. buses, some have bright orange buttons on poles, others have hidden black buttons. Still others require vague hand signals known only to true Chileans.
When I couldn’t figure out how to use a particular bus’s designated system, I’d make my way up to the driver and pray that he would take mercy on me and stop when I asked him to. Sometimes he’d just stare at me like some strange novelty, a towering blonde at 5 feet 3 inches.
I never sat alone in Chile. The bus filled up quickly during my 5:30 p.m. journey from one end of the city to the other. Sometimes I missed my stop, simply because I couldn’t push my way through the mass of people standing in the aisle blocking my way to the door. I had to learn to get up three blocks before my stop in order to position myself effectively for departure.
Although I rarely talked to anyone during my trips, I was never without entertainment. Every few corners a vendor would board the bus, plying his wares. People sold the strangest combinations of goods: pencils and socks, scissors and bandages, stickers and aspirin. They stocked snacks as well: overly processed plastic chocolates, mentholated gum drops and meringues.
When a young man came on board to advertise a full introductory English course for the discounted price of un mil, I bit my lip to keep from laughing. The four flimsy paperback books of blonde cartoon children with the additional picture dictionary, no thicker than a Highlights magazine, would do little to teach anyone the basics of a language.
While the vendors were a novelty, they couldn’t compete with the performers who frequented the buses. There were students singing traditional folk songs, young men butchering reggae and rap, clowns mocking the unlucky gringos on board and older men recounting the highlights of important soccer games over the microphones of large, portable karaoke machines.
In D.C., my commute is clean and detached. No one talks on the bus, let alone sings. I can’t watch my neighbor buy a prayer card from a passing school child or donate money to the older man who has just serenaded us with love songs. I review my French notecards or doze on the window, the smooth ride failing to knock me against my seatmate with every acceleration or pitch in the road. In Santiago, I was pressed against other passengers and against other lives.
