Macau bus(ted)

“Ngoi, ngoi, ngoi” screams the lady behind me, pushing a bony, sharp elbow into my body. Cold-bloodily she smacks my foot with her wooden shoe and dashes to the open bus door. As the vehicle proceeds through the narrow streets I wonder how a creature, the age of my grandmother, two heads shorter than me (which of course makes her size almost minuscule) could be able to produce such vigorous pain-afflicting movements. Senior Asians are surprisingly vital. My aching body is swaying under the unsynchronized movements of the bus. I am standing upright for 40 minutes every day, on the same bus, even though "standing upright" is not the correct way of describing the comic maneuvers necessary to prevent me from rolling on the floor. Driving skills are beyond belief. More than once I found myself face-on-the window (or more embarrassingly face-on-woman's-breasts-in-front-of-me) because the driver suddenly pushed the brakes in the middle of the street. Just so he could clear his throat. And while I am flying around the bus, cursing driver's incompetence in various languages, the passengers around me seem to be cursing my own incompetence in bus-balancing. I always wonder, is it the dried meat they eat all the time that makes them so impressively good at managing the hectic bus movements? Or may be the steamed duck blood? Who knows. I certainly should try those if I want to keep face on the bus.

Before the bus reaches the next destination we get into a roundabout. We look like sardines squashed at one side of the bus for a couple of shameful seconds, followed by sudden (but this time expected) push of the brakes. Everybody is checking their hairs and faces just in case something (earrings, bandannas, eyes) went missing during the roundabout action. Again, a couple of elbows reach for my stomach, ribs and the left kidney, a pair of heavy boots squeeze my humble culture-shocked Converse and the doors are shut again. In the meantime, the bus gets filled up with new passengers from the other door and while I am checking the wholeness of my decompressed right foot, I am slowly being denied my right of space on the buss. Just in a couple of seconds, the body space disappeared and I am standing on one foot, holding the bars with both hands, pressed by people from all sides. “Haya, hayaaaaa” the driver keeps shouting at us, he wants us to move to the back of the bus, so that the people in front will not be right next to his face. Yeah, Asian buses have no carrying capacity. You can always fit another one, and another one, until someone gets annoyed and gets off (normally this someone is one of us- the foreigners).

Just a couple of more minutes and I will be out of here. First the bridge. It connects Taipa, the island where my school is, with Macau, where the rest of my life is. It's the only complete minute on that bus when I am not swaying sideways. Sometimes when its foggy, you cannot see the other side of the bridge, you cannot see anything else but pure plain white color all over the place. Nothing truly exist visibly in that minute. As if the bus and the bridge are sketches in somebody's A4 drawing and you are waiting for the artist's arm to appear and draw the rest of the bridge and whatever follows on the other side. It hasn't appeared yet. May be one day it will, when I least expect it to.

We, smashed like canned chop-sew, arrive in Macau safe and sound. I am stoically withstanding any urges to leave the bus before I reach my final destination. The bus zig-zags around tiny red-lantern streets downtown, between casino alleys and under skytunnels (fewer in Macau than in Hong Kong. Once I managed to walk for half an hour around Hong Kong island without setting food on the street outside and only on the skytunnes or whatever they are called. The opposite of subways. Upways?). I am glad the windows are closed, the noise and air pollution unbearable in peak hours. One, two, three, four stops.. and here I am finally in de buur. Strangely, it feels like home. The sushi place, the barber's shop, the Loi Loi supermarket, the Portugese restaurant. And there is my house – old, yellow, somewhat classy and charming among the 50-story apartment buildings. What else is there to do, than grab a bottle of wine, call a couple of mates and call it a day on the rooftop, surrounded by the night lights of our city-country-home. Some nights I marvel at the complete absence of stars on the polluted sky above Macau. Other nights I wonder, how different the sky is here in Asia than in Europe. You'd see different constellations (of course if you could see any), lower and faster clouds, bigger moons. “Kami, stop daydreaming, Bitte sehr, and pass me your glass”, says somebody from the crew and I surrender to reality.