Often the mark of being part of the life of a community in a city is mastering the public transport. It’s funny how something so trivial can signal being part of the daily life of a city. It can signal being part of something bigger than your individual day-to-day routine and the more confident I appear when taking the buses, I’d like to think the less touristy I seem. However, there are usually various obstacles to overcome before you can integrate as a local.
Firstly, I should mention a few strange things about the buses here in Cyprus, which I will touch on in more detail later.
- The schedule is impossible to understand
- They’re constantly playing music
- Some of the buses don’t have buttons to signal your stop
The bus schedule is incredibly strange. They give you one time for the whole journey, which means that you need to hazard a guess when the bus will show up. At first I thought there was no system and that the bus was always late and occasionally early, but the more time I’ve spent here, the more I’ve realised that there is definitely a system. The problem is that there’s no way of knowing the system unless you actually get into a routine of taking the bus at the same time every day. And because the locals don’t really take the bus, they’re no help at all.
It seems that one of the patterns emerging is that there are mostly the same bus drivers on the allotted routes every day. There is the slightly rude Spanish looking bus driver on my morning bus, who always seems annoyed that I’m showing him my bus pass. He always nods and dismisses it as though saying, “Yeah I know, just sit down”.
Then there’s the Super Mario look-alike who takes me to work when I’m working in the afternoon. This is always a massive inconvenience because he, more often than not, forgets to open the back doors of the bus only at my stop every day! Even though I vary when I press the button, to try and gauge when it’s more helpful for him, he always just seems to forget that I’ve signalled to get off.
Just my luck, every time he forgets, there is a group of rowdy teenage school boys getting on the bus, who I then have to awkwardly push past to get out the front door. Sometimes the bus driver apologises and calls me darling, which only really fuels my hate fire. And it’s only marginally worse than him mouthing hello to me in slow motion every time I get on the bus. I can only assume that it’s because I’m always listening to music and not because he thinks it makes him seem seductive.
Even now and then, usually the last bus of the day at 7pm to town or 7.45pm from town, they pull out this old rickety coach, which oddly enough always seems to have the youngest bus driver. It’s an absolute nightmare of an experience. With no buttons to press, never before have I felt more insecure on a bus. The first few journeys, I found myself frantically looking around at what other people were doing- desperately trying to identify the system in place. I wondered whether I’d ever make it off the bus in time or if I’d be overcome with British politeness and nervously sit there and miss my stop because no one else was getting off/on the bus.
I vividly remember one of my first journeys on the buttonless bus. This was actually a different bus driver as it was in the morning, but I was sitting on my own, listening to my music when I noticed the bus driver turning up the radio which was spurting out some crazy Greek pop music. He looked up at me in the mirror and smirked as if to say “My work here is done” when I admitted defeat and took my earphones out. The same thing happened the next time I took that bus with the same driver. That time, however, I stood my ground and turned up the volume on my iPod and smirked at him instead.
These days, I know that you sit as near to the front of the bus as possible. There’s this unspoken ritual of people constantly moving nearer the front when there’s a seat available. Some people shout in Greek for the bus to stop, others just stand and walk to the front. I’ve started to realise that bus drivers need to be absolute masters of body language. Not only in gauging people’s signals at the bus stop, but also I see them observing some of the subtle signals of the shyer people on the bus. It’s really interesting to watch.
It was then that I realised, I was going to be ok on these buttonless buses. And I would be generally ok on the others, so long as my bus driver remembered to open the doors- I’m still waiting patiently. Through all this, I’m reminded why I hate taking buses…but not enough to walk for over an hour to work every day. So I will continue to grin and bear it like this man on the side of an intercity bus.
Trains, Planes and Eye-opening Moments 