Bus

This week I've had a few bus trips home from work. I have badly bruised toes from my last soccer game, so I am taking a break from the long uphill walks home in the dark. And I've been loving the bus, I have to say. Here are my top 4 reasons why. (I aimed for 5 but fell short. I guess it is just a bus trip after all).

1. I have been catching the 6.15 bus. Downtown Hobart empties out pretty much immediately at 5.30, so much so that I am usually only sharing the bus with five or six others. It's a boutique public transport experience.
2. The evening light at that time (in September) is very nice, and as we head west out of town the foothills drift across in front of Mt Wellington in a cinematic way. Being high up in the bus, the lighted first floor windows we pass reveal little mundane scenes, one after another. The whole experience of being on a bus is like being in a German movie, especially if you have headphones on - your own soundtrack. Less so if the bus is crowded and if someone behind you is breaking up with his girlfriend on the phone - but that doesn't happen on this bus.
3. The bus stop is right in front of our house. It is not a long trip, but its long enough that disembarking right at our gate always comes as a little surprise. The bus door whooshes shut behind you, and the bus wheezes off up the road as you go up the front steps, somehow with an air of a departing magic carpet, after its job is done.
4. I used to associate bus travel with book reading. Waiting for the bus bored me to tears, and I actually couldn't stand to leave the house without a book. Sometimes choosing the book took so long that as I stood there by the bookshelf with my head at that book-choosing angle, I would hear the whoosh of my bus would going past. Now, I am listening to podcasts on my journey - which also allows you to look up and out and absorb the cinematic blah blah I waxed lyrical about above. While listening to amusing people talking about topical things happening in California.