The Crowded Bus

I am of the Germanic persuasion: the less human contact the better. I am not warm, I’m not gregarious, and I do not like to touch other human beings, or that they touch me.

But here it is all otherwise, and there’s the crowded busses.

They usually stand waiting to enter the bus right in-front of the doors unless unreasonably constrained by the Mayor’s employees to make a line off to the side. They often let people off the bus very grudgingly, and I have actually stood aside to let people on before getting off. This is partly due to the drivers who are impatient, who cause door mechanism to hiss at the passengers and the warning to sound to rush them on. But it is part of Bogota: they stand right in front of the elevator doors and stare at you as if to say, What, you’re getting out?

This used to make me angry. I would push through them, sometimes roughly. It was really stupid of them to stand there and I’d stare at them and they’d look down. It is a problem that they do this, but it isn’t something a foreigner is going to change. Once I almost knocked a guy over and he stared at me in outrage. They’re outraged because they don’t think ahead about what is going to happen when the doors open and people come out. When it happens everybody readjusts, but the more shameless push through greedy for a seat or a good place. Or they are waiting for another bus like this guy was, and will stand as close to the door as they possibly can. I used to think it was outrageous they should expect people exiting to wriggle through the waiting mass.

Latin American’s aren’t the only one’s with uncomfortably close notions of personal space, but there is no doubt that Colombian’s have a more limited sense of personal space than I do. I’m fastidious and I hate being constantly unnecessarily touched, but to them it is nothing. The quality of life being what it is in Bogota, one is touched rather often, and especially on the crowded bus. I do everything I can to avoid human contact but a Latin American cannot be bothered: it doesn’t mean that much to them.

I deal with it by wondering what their consciousness of the world is, by attempting to perceive how exactly it is they don’t notice the lack of space, the brush on the sleeve, the touching of a backpack. One becomes more detached and then it is easier to ignore. And I deal with it by moving the way they do through crowded spaces.

It requires a more passive approach. Moving through a stagnant crowd means signaling your intentions and then waiting, like a quietist. You start moving toward the door and stop when your way is blocked. What happens is that they shift aside and you move, as it were, through a living organism. If you are slow and gentle you become part of a great, collective movement all directed at permitting you to get through. You pass with a new sense of human contact: the contact changes quality. It is perhaps like being born.

At least that is what I like to think when I get out of the crowded bus with the help of all the others I had to pass and rub against. I like to think that I am born again a Colombian. It is something alien to my way of proceeding, but now I like it because it requires its understanding, its mental mode of operation. And I think with this I’m closer to the consciousness they have of contact and personal space: there is some withinness to being among strangers they always perceive.

Curious, if it turns out to be true. They are very welcoming of strangers here, that is certain.