Welcome to Seattle!

As introductions to a City go, Seattle's was probably amongst the worst I'd ever experienced. Nothing bad happened to me, in fact it wasn't any one event that stands out in my mind but as an advertisement for the City into which I'd just arrived, several people did their darnedest to make me dislike it!

In reality it all happened in the space of a bus. Well, two buses if you cant the one that refused to open its doors to let me in, despite seeing me there lugging my bags around at the airport bus stop. Nope, this stubborn ass driver had taken a leaf straight out of the London manual for bus drivers. Thankfully (or not) a 2nd bus arrived not long after to which I was invited to take a seat.

Someone, someone high up clearly wanted me to take that bus! Maybe I was finally detaching myself from London life, relaxing more and getting stressed less but what happened on that bus, although seemingly nothing to particularly get excited about, made me realise just how uptight or just plain annoying some people can be.

It seems rather funny to me now that something so simple, such a daily routine can be worth such thought, but the more I think about it, the more I realise its exactly this sort of thing that I needed to take a step back away from!

Let me begin with a young teenage guy sat on the bus, minding his own business when a n older guy decides he wants to sit next to him. The young lad is rather baffled by this, as am I. It wouldn't have seemed out of the ordinary except for the fact that the bus was left than half empty and there were plenty of completely empty double seats to be taken up. It wasn't at the front of the bus, the guy wasn't disabled, he seemed to just want an argument. Whatever it was the older guy wanted he was clearly going to argue about it, getting the driver involved in his little episode.

As I said, really its nothing. Its hardly ground breaking events but it made me see just how petty some people can be. How someone who clearly was old enough top know better, who could see the myriad of available seats could deliberately cause aggravation just for kicks is beyond me.

Which leads me nicely onto the 2nd incident. Nope we haven't even left the bus yet. Enter 2 guys who, it seemed wanted to be magically teleported to where they wanted to go in a matter of seconds. Every traffic light, every stop to let someone on or off, every moment that bus wasn't moving forward in a timely manner there was a huff from one, normally followed by a puff. The journey seeming to get evermore huffersom and puffersom as the minutes ticked by. Once again, this is hardly something new and I've lost count of the number of occasions I would yell at a imminently departing tube or bus that I'd just missed or that was making me late for work. However for me to be noticing such things and to be astonished by them makes me proud. If I was like this once, I would hope to God that now I've seen it for what it really is I will never go back to doing such things.

Most notably though it was something I hadn't really noticed in the US as a whole, (maybe I just HADN'T noticed it), yet within the space of 30 minutes or so I'd been subjected to all the things I'd been trying to get away from and felt an anger and a resentment of the locals that I'd not felt anywhere else. I hoped it would get better but as a "Welcome to Seattle" its hardly a positive advertisement for the City!