"I Missed the Bus, Oh!"

First person to tell me who sings the titular song gets a postcard.

Public transportation is a beautiful thing. It saves gas. It allows you to read, sleep, or eat while going to and from wherever you need to go. It gives you encounters with wonderfully ridiculous people in atrocious outfits.

Having now consistently relied upon public transportation for two weeks now, I can say that there are no words to describe the feeling of walking up to the tram/train/bus stop and watching the tram/train/bus slip through your fingers and drive away. Did I mention it's probably really cold, windy, and perhaps raining? Ok. So I'm being overdramatic. It hasn't actually happened to me in the rain...YET.

I wish I could report that a comparable feeling of bliss to mirror that despair is felt when successfully dashing across traffic and leaping onto the tram in the nick of time...however this has not happened to me. Each time I try, it's the wrong number bus. Then I just have to wait more.

Public transportation in this city is bizarre. Trams are the primary mode of transport, as in cable cars, but there are also trains that operate as if they were sort of subways, and then buses, which I haven't seen yet. Apart from the just missing of these vessels, so far there have been at least three peculiar happenings.

First, my friend was on her way to meet us at the bar last Friday when her tram stopped...and didn't start going again. She soon noticed all the other trams had stopped as well. Somehow she heard on the news that there was a taxi-driver strike, and I suppose the tram drivers jumped in, too. Seems they were pissed off because a cab driver was murdered recently and they think the city doesn't give them enough protection. She had to walk all the way to meet us in heels. Poor thing.

Then, the other day, I was coming back from dinner between 8pm and 9pm. I was talking to my friend about the connections between domestic abuse, child abuse, and animal abuse, when the token drunk man on the bus poked me - POKED ME in the ankle - with his long metal pole. "We need more vegetarians," he slurred. He then repeated this statement several times, getting louder each time. I nodded and said, "Yeah." A few seconds later he said, "Say YES!" Not wanting to give in to his demands, I sat silent. He screamed again, "Say YES! Say YES!" I commented, "I am a vegetarian." He was not satisfied and again began repeatedly shouting, "Say YES! Say YES! Say YES!" To shut him up, I muttered, "Yes" as softly as I could. He then opined to the woman next to him, "Say Yes, not yeah. That's what my English teacher used to tell me." And with that, he exited the tram because he thought he left his bag somewhere.... Please do not tell my mother this story, she is already worried enough as it is without learning of drunkards poking her daughter with a metal pole.

Finally, and most interestingly, today the trams stopped because there were some protesters in the street. My first reaction to this is, "well, fucking move them." The gentleman who informed me that he didn't know when these people would be moving and tram service resumed did not tell me what the protest was about. I suspect, though, it was the continuation of the protest I had seen half an hour before in front of the library. They were shouting that Israel should leave Lebanon and Palestine: "What do we want? Isreal Out! When do we want it? Now!"

I am fascinated by this because last Friday, on my birthday, I was treated to another Israel/USA protest in front of the law school: "Israel, USA, how many kids have you killed today?" This intrigues me because before coming here, and I'm sure it is still happening now, the American media almost exclusively gives an anti-Hezbollah slant to what is going on. There's no doubting that from what I've read they seem like the bad guys. However, that is not the sentiment I'm feeling here at all. Granted, I have only seen a couple of protests, but the media is also reporting it differently. I guess the moral of the story is that our media is still vulnerable to bias and we can't forget there are two sides to every story. I'm not saying either report is right or wrong or that either side is right or wrong, just interesting to see the difference.