Stranger Communication

I love the way we interact with strangers sometimes. Especially here in Germany, where people tend not to smile at each other on the street unless you they know each other, it's always a neat experience when circumstances force you to interact.

Yes, sometimes there's the unpleasant interactions, like when you can feel everyone as a group getting angry in the check-out line when the cashier couldn't possibly scan the items any slower, but sometimes, there's fun moments.

Two of them happened to me today - one of them was when I got out of the grocery store and knew that when I had gone in, there were supposedly five minutes until my bus left from the nearest stop. I had dashed through that supermarket pretty quickly, so I thought I had a chance at catching the bus. I rounded the corner and saw it waiting about twenty yards away and could see the busdriver inside reaching to pull the lever that makes the doors close. At the exact same second, I and a woman about three feet in front of me, also lugging awkward shopping bags, burst into a run. We ran in unison and caused enough commotion that the driver stopped and waited for us. When we clambered on to the bus and the door snapped shut behind us, the other lady turned back to me and gave me the smallest of half-smiles, which I returned. This is the stranger equivalent of a high-five. Fantastic!

The other moment today was also in a bus. I was on my way back from the university at one of the most popular times in the day and was in enough of a rush to get back into town that I did force my way into one of the overcroweded buses instead of waiting for a later one. What with backpacks, huge purses and the occasional musical instrument, those buses are really full. A person behind me was loudly telling a story and apparently gesticulating just as much as the limited space would allow when an enormously tall and scary looking guy stood up from his seat behind the student and bellowed at the student who had apparently tapped this man's shoulder with his backpack during the telling of this story. (Keep in mind that I couldn't breathe without touching somebody who was standing next to me - this bus was FULL.) The man went on and on about how rude that student was being and how careless and how he shouldn't go around treating people on buses like that - it went on and on even though the student had apologized more than once. Eventually, the student stopped trying and I couldn't blame him. Three minutes later, the bus stopped and the tall man, still grumbling, shoved his way out of the bus, saying exactly like a pissed-off five-year-old "Well, fine, now YOU can have the seat." I looked forward at the strangers that I was standing nose-to-nose with and we shared the tiniest of smiles - this wasn't a high-five like the last time. This was a "if-we-weren't-convinced-the-crazy-guy-would-come-right-back-in-we'd-all-start-laughing-like-a-bunch-of-schoolgirls"-look. And that was just the lightness I needed to endure the rest of that bus ride to the train station.