“Watch out for that guy with the pot on his head.” Riding the bus in a new city and for the first time as a matter of fact, can be quite the misadventure. I think I discovered my obsessive compulsive habit over the past week. The first challenge, my roommate and I were in dire need of getting to Fred Meyer. So, I grabbed a transit book (very handy!) and looked up how to get there. All I knew was that it was on some street and that a bus would get us there. So, we did the cunning thing and hopped on the next bus around 7:16pm. It looked good. Surprisingly, we found ourselves there in the parking lot 7 minutes later! I think it was luck.

The way back wasn’t so fortunate. We missed the first bus, and the second back to the campus. We had to call and find a route to use. Waiting can be scary, especially when you are greeted by a couple climbing over the chain fence and falling to their feet on the sidewalk beside you.

There is a whole different culture of people that ride the bus. Sure here it’s mainly college students, but now and again you get your entertaining people. Especially on the weekends, that’s when it comes alive with all sorts of characters. My OCD kicked in when I had to pick up my friend from the Amtrak station. I highlighted and crossed out times and arrivals of 3 different bus routes to and from the station. And with the train being late, I did the highlighting process all over again to make sure I got there on time. I’d also check the bus times over and over outta fear that I missed it.

Over the course of the weekend, we were surrounded by Japanese kids and their assortments of Sponge Bob, Spiderman, and Hello Kitty bed comforters, a man with a southern accent dressed up as Johnny Appleseed (complete with pot on head) claiming to be going to a kayak competition, a 3 year old toe-headed boy that really liked the ladies, a blind girl who sang the whole way and then got off at the wrong stop (no joke), a bag man with (I swear!) a butcher knife in his backpack along with possible drug items, and those darn senior citizens that only need to pay 35cents. All in all, the bus gets you a lot of places, it’s just a matter of where you want to go, and who you want to sit next to.