Spontaneous, on my standards, was this trip to Boston. Though we had discussed taking a trip somewhere for some time, it wasn't until perhaps two days before we departed on Friday that Cliff and I had booked anything final.
We took a Chinatown bus. I've heard plenty about these and I can't wait to set some time aside to write a review on Yelp for it. But since I want to go into a bit more emotional and mental and physical detail, I will begin the description of the venture here:
I've only taken Megabus, Greyhound, and too-expensive-for-my-church's-budget charter buses. And one really first-classish bus from Syracuse to NYC for a class trip-- (mostly) an expense graciously paid for by the English department (I heard they were the buses traveled on by collegiate sport athletes). Anyway, the point is that I've taken a few and the ones where I've paid some sum of money to travel from city to city, it has typically been not so pleasant or not as pleasant as this one. The only issue was traffic, and no one really has control over that. Really, the troubling thing was that there was traffic... and our bus driver tried to get out of it by backing up on the freeway. Yes, he reversed the bus on the freeway.
The only other time I've experienced reversal on the freeway was in Cincinnati. In fact, one of my last days in Cincinnati. It was days before moving to NY in early December and I was going on my last thrifting spree with some coworkers. It was dumping snow that early afternoon and taking a highway was the last thing we should have done, despite that cars travel at snail-pace even with the slightest bit of precipitation. As we were turning onto a ramp, further ahead we saw blinking emergency lights and two or three cars in a collision in the midst of a snowy rampage. A man was standing in the snow waving at us to stop. We ended up backing off the ramp in reverse, all the way to the exit. The typically 20 minute drive took two hours. Ashley was laughing, and I was not.
Back to this bus. What this reversal meant was that he had signaled to get to the very right lane and put his emergency lights on. As they blinked away and the passengers were mostly quiet and probably in a slumber or half-so (as was I), the bus began traveling backwards. There was a low concrete "wall" blocking cars at the very right lane from falling off. Soon, however, that wall disappeared as we reversed slowly for about five minutes and there was a break in the wall. Sitting by the window, it was quite a scene: we were somewhere in Connecticut, and there were many trees, but most of all, there was a rail system with electric lines everywhere above it and below us, where we would unpleasantly fall upon had there been a slip of a mere two inches. Just as I started mentally rationalizing how my family and friends and coworkers would know of this news regarding the Chinatown Bus That Fell Off A Freeway, a New Yorker stood up and broke the silence and confusion stirring within the bus. "Excuse me," she said with such attitude. "What exactly are you doing?"
The Chinese bus driver halted and almost shouted at her as if she was the one who was crazy. "I'm getting off the exit! Unless you want to be stuck in 40 miles of traffic for two hours!" he yelled angrily (and probably not in such grammar). The elderly Asian couple behind us said, "No, too dangerous," and the rest of the bus made some sort of commotion of agreement. The red-headed, maxi dress-wearing dame beside us, however, who we had stood behind in the line before boarding the bus, was amused. "I say just do it," she said. "Just go." But once the Asian couple behind us again proclaimed its danger, she suggested a different idea: "Why can't you just get off the next exit?"
The Chinese bus driver essentially threw up his hands and told us all to have fun in two hours of traffic as he lunged the bus forward-- seven minutes wasted trying to go backwards this whole time. Cliff looked at me and said, "I think he could have done it."
When we arrived, we became a lot more bright-eyed about the trip. So youthful! Such ease of access! Such a quaint little town. By the end of the next day, we felt like we had conquered most of what city life was like in Boston. Cliff brought up an interesting point about us traveling to different cities. We step foot into these new places with the question of "could I live here" first and foremost, rather than simply reveling in what the city has to offer. Not that we don't take into account that the Freedom Trail could have been interesting or that the Duck Tour would have been fun, but really, why not open up the possibility that this could be your home if you wanted it to be?
That's how I arrived to the conclusion yesterday. What scares me, however, is the idea that my current living in NY gives me some sense of superiority over other cities. Forever, NY will stand above all for many reasons that other cities cannot easily replicate nor do I believe is their intention to do so. Not everyone adjusts to New York as they do in other cities. Although cities like Cincinnati gives me every reason to believe that both good and bad people exist everywhere, and that what you make out of your experience is important to the makeup of the city, I have to say that even Cincinnati has a scene for people like me. In Boston, everyone was very Abercrombie-and-Fitch, as my boss recalled yesterday.
There are other cities people love that I have little-to-no interest in. Sometimes my lack of interest in the nearest city to where I grew up makes me sad, and I wonder if something or someone will help me see something different in it one day. But for now, that's how I feel about cities. It's a big tell about how much I enjoy being in New York at this time in my life-- something that I had not recognized until post-Boston.
