The Tale of an Unexpected Friendship...or Not

Hello my dear reader, how are you this fine time of reading this? Good....bad?

How am I you didn't ask? Well...

If you haven't read my last entry, this one will make a lot more sense if you do. It'll paint a better picture for you. But if not, let me briefly summarise it.

I have regular bus drivers that have come to 'know me.' Know me in the sense of being familiar with me on an appearance-based level. (I'm a foreigner. I don't get much more stand-out-ish than that of a foreigner riding a bus full of Koreans.) On top of that, the weekly bus drivers know where I get on and get off at this point. So that's what I mean by 'have come to know me.'

One bus driver in particular comes off as quite cut-throat and impatient. His driving can be quite abrupt, as well as his stopping. He stops far away from the people getting on sometimes, and he won't open the door again once he's closed it. He has never been mean to anyone directly though, unless you consider him driving away when you were two seconds too late to the door mean, then okay yes he's been a little mean. However this has never happened to me, because as I said in my previous entry, I am always on top of my game with the bus drivers - in fear of all that happening to me.

Alright, so now that we have that covered...today I witnessed another side of him....I think?

So occasionally more than one bus makes it to the bus stop at the same time, so sometimes your bus might be behind another and therefore the wise thing to do is to walk to it. Me? I frikken run.

Why? Well, let me tell you the thought process of a serial over-thinker:

1) If my bus stops behind another bus and I walk slowly to it, if the front bus starts driving off, my bus could potentially think there's no passengers (or the bus driver may be annoyed that I wasn't faster) and drive off with it.

2) You know that awkward thing you do when you walk in the exact same path as someone else and you have to move out of the way but you both awkwardly side step the same way, and then you awkwardly side-step the other way until you get to a point where you're doing this weird dance of 'oh my Lord, just strike me down and end this sheer misery.' Yeah, that one. Well similarly with the bus, if you walk to the bus and you're not fast enough, it might move forward to be closer to the bus stop and then you have to do the walk of shame back from where you came. A kind of back-and-forth if you will.

3) If a bus is too far away from the stop (there is a fine line and I'm not exactly sure where it is), then the bus driver won't let you get on even though you're standing there internally begging to avoid humiliation and rejection all at once and once again, you have to walk back from where you came.

So regardless of all that, I run in hopes that the driver will see my efforts of getting there as fast as possible to avoid all of the above, and let me on anyway. A tip for number 3 is that if the bus seems a little too far away, don't walk to it unless someone else does first and they're allowed on or unless the driver opens the door. I would opt to wait for it to come closer as the bus driver will assume they probably have to stop again at the actual stop anyway.

So during the time of this story I'm telling, there was another bus that arrived at the same time as my good ol' bus number 25. So I bonked my way over in urgency and got on. I said hello the Mr MYLD (if you know you know) and scanned my card. Now usually if it's pretty full, I'll sit in the very front single seat that's opposite the driver but also slightly further back. So I did just that. The bus was relatively full and my default seat was free so I sat in it. Then one of my worst fears came to life.

I was briefly looking down at my phone when I heard someone whom I could only assume to be the bus driver speaking. Now I would often assume that they're talking on the phone to someone but this didn't sound like that...this sounded like a question by the intonation I could pick up on. My whole body clenched up like a clam refusing to open without taking a knife to it. I'm also pretty sure my jaw clenched just as hard. I hoped so hard in the moment that this wasn't going to be what I thought it was.

Of course I was w-r-o-n-g.

I looked up, probably pale white and deer-eyed. This man was in fact asking me a question. ME. I was the only one in the front at that point and he was looking directly at me in the review mirror, so I couldn't avoid my fate.

My face when I realised the bus driver was in fact talking to me.

I'm pretty sure I just said 'neh?' in hopes that he would repeat himself and so he did, but unfortunately I couldn't quite understand it. Usually there are a set of generic questions that foreigners will be plagued with by Koreans and they're usually along the lines of:

Where are you from?

Are you a student?

You're American?

Do you like Korean food?

There are some others but the standard one for me is 'Where are you from' or 'How did you come to Korea?'. He didn't ask any of those. I also cancelled out 'Where are you going?' and 'Where do you live?' because A) He knows exactly where I'm going and B) The first question would be slightly creepy. I also feel confident enough that I know those translated into Korean so I was really trying to crank the wheels of my brain overtime in hopes that I could conclude what this man could possibly be asking me of all people.

The other thing is that when I don't understand something (and yes I'm aware that this can come back to bite me in the ass) I will by default answer 'yes' in hopes that I got it right.

But in some circumstances, you want to say 'no' in hopes that that'll be the right answer. However I thought; What if he's asking if his driving is good??? and then I tell him 'no.' LOL (cries and dies).

It was too risky to do any of that. I tried asking him again a.k.a looking confused as hell and he proceeded to ask it again in such a seemingly-kind way :( This man was being nice to me... that or he was nicely asking if I'm stupid. He was trying to be friendly with me I think and I hope. Unfortunately I really wasn't understanding. It didn't help that when he could see I wasn't really understanding, he asked again in the same exact way - in the same exact tone and at the same pace.

Being an English teacher, I'm aware that I need to adjust the way I say things to my students. They don't really speak enough English for me to talk to them like I would to a fellow native English speaker, so I slow down and I'll change the question or the wording to try and make it easier for them to understand. I'll also do this with any other Korean I'm trying to talk to if needed. Heck, I would do this with anyone in any country if they were trying to communicate with me or I with them.

Here in Korea I've experienced the exact opposite. Don't understand what someone is saying? Fear not because they'll repeat it twenty-seven times and hope that you'll eventually understand it. Slow down their speaking? Nope, more like speed it up in hopes that it'll enter your brain faster. It's quite perplexing...and of course it isn't everyone. But some people really have no idea how to accommodate my slow-processing brain and because of it, I instantly malfunction and shut down. I become a piece of cardboard - stiff and unable to speak.

So it was the same with my bus driver here. He didn't ask the question insanely fast or repeat it twenty-seven times but he did say it in a way that would be hard for a foreigner like me to understand given the fact that I have zero context to grab onto as it came outta nowhere - and when repeating it twice, he said the same thing. So I eventually told him I wasn't good at Korean and I'm sorry. He left it then when he realised I wasn't going to understand it but I instantly felt like I had disappointed him and I had also disappointed myself. Welcome toxic trait number 99. I also would have tried to type into a translator what he had said but it was so unclear in my brain that I didn't even know how to spell it and by the time of typing this, I can't even remember what the question was. On top of this, he sits behind a glass encasing so it makes it a little more difficult to hear clearly. I was also hyper-aware of all the Koreans behind me probably watching this failed interaction and I absolutely hate drawing attention, so all the odds were stacked against me.

Another fear is me having to get off the bus but the bus drivers' sometimes forget to open the door, therefore you have to tell them it's your stop or at least ask them to open it. I've had to do this once while being in Korea and thank goodness I was getting off because it's just so embarrassing to have to shout out loudly in a language you're not exactly confident with - in front of everyone who speaks it.

So after all that, we eventually got to my stop and I made my way to the exit door. I was the only one getting off too. I started walking in the direction of my work and I heard my bus driver hoot. Huh? For me???

Was that hoot for me?

I looked around and once again jumped to other possibilities in my brain. He usually hoots for people when he's near the stop so that they can look up and figure out if this is their bus, but he was driving away from the stop so that couldn't be it. He also usually hoots if there's a slow car or something but I couldn't see that being right either. He couldn't be hooting to someone else because no one else got off? So was it for me? Was he trying to be friendly and communicate in another way? Give me some reassurance?

The reason for the title of this entry is because I really don't know. I could be overthinking EVERYTHING and he in fact doesn't care at all. But on a sweeter level, I'd like to think this man has taken the initiative to still build a rapport with me in a way that we can both universally understand. We may not be able to communicate on the standard level of talking to one another, but we have found an unusual way of acknowledging the other and showing that we are in fact familiar with each other. Again, this is all my own speculation and I could be way, way off - but it never hurts to have hope.

Maybe sometime in the near future, I'll confidently ask him what he had said to me on that first day we spoke (he spoke). Then hopefully, I can answer him.

Until then, I'll assume that not all is what it seems to be with this bus driver. I know you should never judge a book by its cover, and I didn't, honest. But I never expected out of all my bus drivers, that this would be the one to try and talk to me in my two years of being here.

I know these entries are supposed to be about my bus trauma, and although I was briefly traumatised by this interaction, I left the bus with a little fuzzy feeling of hope and curiosity.

Life sure is full of surprises.

Until the next stop,

Bus Blog Driver Tay