Tales of public transportation

I ride the bus everyday to and from work. If you ride public transportation much, you know you can run into some characters. My brother drives the bus in Seattle, so I'm sure he's got plenty of great stories to tell. Today I witnessed my first really strange encounter, so I thought I would share it with you.

Behind my is sitting an Indian, perhaps Indian-American, man with a red stripe in the middle of his forhead. While on the freeway, an African-American woman sits a seat in front of me and across the isle. She turns to the Indian man says, "What's that?", referring to the mark on his forhead. Unfortunately, the Indian fellow doesn't understand English very well, and the African-American woman isn't speaking as clearly as one might hope. After several attempts to understand her, he finally says "It's a religious symbol", to which she responds "Where you from?" He doesn't understand. "You from Africa?" Nothing. She then repeats "Africa?" several times, thinking for some reason that this will help. At this point it became clear to me that this was no casual conversation.

Finally understanding, he says to her "No, India". She immediately responds "Oh no, we wouldn't go so low class to wear something like that." At first I thought she simply misunderstood him. But she then went into a string of tirades: "You say you're from India, so why do you talk like that?" "Where did you get the skin bleach and hair straightener? I didn't know they sold those still. I guess that's how the Slave Masters did it." (I assume she was accusing this man of really being an African but bleaching his skin and straightening his hair, but I have to admit to being a bit puzzled by this one.) "That red line [on his forhead] represents the Red Sea. Do you know where the Red Sea is?" At this point the poor guy just kind of stares blankly at her. "No, you don't even know where the Red Sea is so how can you say you from India?" "You say you're from India, but you talk like [unintelligible]." (This last claim was repeated several times.) "Next week you'll tell me you're Chinese," pointing to a gentleman who I'm fairly sure was Japanese. "You don't even know where the Red Sea is and you say you're from Indian. [pause] You know, a mind is a terrible thing to waste." I muttered under my breath "Indeed".

When we got downtown (this was after the Indian fellow got off the bus), she sort of yelled to no one in particular "Hey, where's Nicolett?" No one in particular answered, so she then looked at a Hispanic woman across the isle from her and yelled "Hello?" The Hispanic woman responded "It's down that way." "Oh, I thought you were going to pull one of those "No English" things on me."

What a strange morning.