One of the Reasons I Love the English
My sister Angela and I were returning to Alnwick, a town in England where we had each spent a separate semester studying, after an afternoon of shopping in Newcastle.
As we left Newcastle, we made sure to take the 505 bus since it is much faster getting back to Alnwick than the 516. Plus, it was my cousin-in-law’s birthday so we wanted to get back in time for her party.
So we got on the upper level of the 505 double decker bus a little after four in the afternoon. We were about three miles outside of Newcastle (which, let me add, is only 25 miles from Alnwick) on the freeway, when the bus slows way down. Ang and I were a bit confused, but then the bus started speeding up again, so we went back to discussing our Topshop and H&M purchases. Not for long though, because about a minute later, the bus started slowing down again and this time the bus driver pulled over to the side of the freeway and stopped.
Since Ang and I were on the upper deck of the bus, we had no clue what was going on. We sat there, kind of laughing, and being like “are you kidding me right now?” Then we started laughing even more because there were about ten to twelve other people sitting up on top with us and no one – no one! – seemed even remotely fazed. The old lady two seats behind us continued to knit without stopping. The man across the aisle from us never lowered the paper he was reading. The guy a few aisles ahead of didn’t look up from the game he was playing on his cell phone. A girl diagonally ahead of us kept reading her tabloid magazine. And the group of teenagers on the back of the bus kept up their loud conversation about who was hooking up with who at their school.
Ang and I shook our heads in wonderment. If it was America people would be throwing fits. But here they just continued to sit there reading and talking about everything but the fact that the bus just apparently broke down.
Five minutes passed. No one came up to let us know what was going on.
“Do you think we should go down there and see what’s up?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Ang said with a giggle. “No one else is.”
Ang and I dissolved into the kind of giggles you get when you’re at a loss for words to describe a situation and have no clue what else to do. The rest of the patient people on our level probably thought we were drunk. Through our laugh attack Ang and I concluded that we didn’t want to be the obnoxious Americans demanding to know what was happening. It didn’t occur to us that they may have already been thinking that about us, anyway.
Finally, after another ten minutes, the bus driver appeared at the top of the stairs.
“The line to the accelerator pedal has broken,” he informed us in a thick cockney accent. “We are waiting for another bus to come pick us up.” Another bus? What bus? How long? He didn’t say and no one asked. He descended back down the stairs and our bus mates went back to their previous activities.
“What the hell?” Ang said in a strained voice and we dissolved into giggles once more. Now everyone probably thought we were high as well as being drunk.
“How can they be so calm about this?” I half-whispered, half-choked through my laughter.
It took another twenty-five minutes before the bus that was on its way to save us showed up.
As we looked at it pulling up behind us, Ang and I both gasped. “No way,” I said.
“I thought he meant they were bringing a new empty bus for us,” Ang whispered.
We both stared in dread at the number 516 highlighted on the front of the bus.
“I’m sure another bus is coming,” I said as the bus driver popped his head up the stairs again.
“Anyone going to Morpeth?” He asked.
“What about Alnwick?” Ang asked.
“Alnwick? Yeah, you want that bus,” he said, nodding his head toward the back window.
Ang and I exchanged an exasperated look.
“There’s not another bus coming?” I whined, no longer caring if I came across as an obnoxious American.
“Not if you’re going to Alnwick,” he replied.
Ang and I collected our shopping bags with a sigh and joined about ten other passengers from our bus climbing onto the 516.
Of which there were no seats left. We sat uncomfortably in the middle of the double decker stairwell for the first half-hour of the trip.
Since the 516 winds around and makes a few dozen stops in every little nook and cranny of every little small town around Newcastle, it took us two hours to finally get to the last stop. Alnwick.
We were late for the birthday party, but we had a fun story to tell!
Tags: Croatia, England
Pokeyike
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