buzzz
I sincerely and whole-heartedly hate taking the bus. Every day I grid my teeth as I step on and every day I count my lucky stars when I get of. I especially count the one that kept me alive and the one that kept me from throwing up (I get extremely car sick when I take the bus).
Ever since my car died on me (just happened rather recently and I'm still mourning) I've had to take the bus and let me tell you, the Icelandic bus system sucks.. big time!!! It's never on time, the drivers are rude and mean (something I guess is very characteristic of all Icelanders but in them it really gets on my nerves because they're driving the very busses I love to hate), the busses are either too cold or too warm and they take way too long to get anywhere. When I go to work I have to take 3 busses, and I have to wait at least 10 minutes for every one. As a result it takes me about an hour to go where it took me only 10 minutes when I had a car. I only have to take one bus to get to school but I have to walk very far to get to the stupid bus stop, in the morning, in the dark, in the cold. Ugh
Incredibly enough this post isn't about my undying hate for busses. This post is about how segregation has just wandered into the Icelandic bus system, this post is about a sign I saw when I was sitting in a bus, concentrating extremely hard on not hurling my lungs out. The sign almost made me loose my concentration which would have made the person sitting in front of me very mad indeed.
The sign was of a dog, there wasn't anything strange or unusual about this dog. It was in fact a very typical kind of a dog you would expect to see on a sign concerning dogs. It was badly drawn and looked very much like a horse. The strange thing about the sign was that underneath the dog there was an arrow pointing at the rear end of the bus. Next to this sign there was another one. On it was the same kind of dog but with a red line over it and underneath was and arrow pointing towards the front of the bus. As I was sitting there in aw of this amazingly bad sign of the horselike dog I couldn't help but wonder it's meaning.
The busses in Iceland are wallpapered with signs. Some of them tell you to stand up for old people or women carrying small children, others tell you that you're not supposed to cross the street until after the bus has passed but most of them tell you of the numerous things you are not allowed to have on the bus. No skateboards, no drinks, no popcorn, no potato chips, no smoking, no rollerblades etc. For some reason I have always just assumed that with all those no's it was a given that you couldn't bring your pets on the bus. And with all the signreading I've done in my time it seemed very obvious to me that this particular sign was conveying the message that dog's are in fact allowed on Icelandic busses, as long as they stay at the back of the bus.
As much as this actually amazed me it also frightened me. I began to imagine that at the next bus stop someone would come in with a poodle. This of course scared the hell out of me since I'm terrified of poodles, I love dogs - but not poodles(long story really, traumatised as a kid bla bla bla) and since I was sitting at the back of the bus. Fortunately there were no dog lovers bussing that time but I can't help feeling sorry for them, having to haul their asses and k9's at the very back of the bus.
The fact that you are allowed to take dogs on the bus amazed me even so that I had to take a closer look at the sign (yes, I know.. I have a very sad life). At closer examination I saw that there didn't seem to be a collar on the dog and there was no sign of a dog owner. So maybe the dogs that are smart enough to actually get on a bus and pay the fare by themselves are the only ones allowed to ride. But if they are in fact that smart why do they have to stay at the back. Why can't they sit, stand or bark wherever they want to?
