On the Bus

I haven't taken a taxi since Bobby left town almost 4 weeks ago. They aren't expensive by US standards, but once you get used to paying for things in pesos, it seems silly to pay 10 pesos for a trip that costs 80 centavos by bus or 70 by subway. (Taxi fares went up this week, actually, though I don't know by how much. I imagine it's not enough to make any difference at all to tourists.)

I'm learning to navigate the bus lines a bit more smoothly, and had as real breakthrough moment last weekend when I could actually help a local woman figure out which bus line to take.

Here's the #1 Colectivo, which I saw for the first time this weekend. Look at that amazing, fat, chunky #1. Yes, at first it's almost unrecognizable as a number, but in context (every bus has a number there, so you know it's a number) it's quite beautiful.



Once you're on-board, the ride is an always-entertaining combination of lurching, listing, and turning sharply down tight corners into narrow streets that will never accommodate a bus but somehow do. Sometimes the squealing brakes and wheezing hydraulics of the doors opening and closing can be almost as annoying as, say, a twittering torcaza at 4:45 in the morning. (Ahem. It's 5:01 right now and guess who, despite a dark plodding rain, just started up? Good morning, idiot bird.)

For all of their physical irregularities, it's surprising that the only actual malfunctioning I've seen has been with collection boxes, which seem to be the colectivo's Achilles' heel. On one trip, one or two customers were having trouble getting change. The driver tried in vain to help them out. One young guy couldn't pay because of the problem, so walked into the back anyway. At the next stop, a uniformed bus agent got on and started collecting tolls manually. I have no idea how he knew to come—I guess the driver must have called or signalled him somehow, but it seemed to happen too quickly. Perhaps the problem had been going on for some time, although I'd been on the bus for ten minutes or so and the fare box had been fine for all of that time. The collector (at the driver's prompting) even hunted down the young guy to get his 80 centavos.

Today I was riding home from Malba, the nice modern art museum, having seen an interesting round-table discussion and poetry reading about Oliverio Girondo. I'm very pleased to have discovered a bus (102) that takes me practically from my door to the steps of the museum. I have a seat on the way home, which is a luxury. There aren't that many people because I had just missed the bus a few minutes ahead of us. After about 10 minutes, a guy tries to pay his fare and can't. The driver hits a button, but it's no good. Another person gets on, and can't pay the fare. At the next stop, the driver lets a few people off, but waves off the three or four people waiting to get on. They don't even look too angry, so I guess this happens a lot. (Well, one of them did look pretty peeved, actually.) The driver then reaches over and pulls out a cardboard sign that says "Máquina Fuera De Servicio," which he now waves at every stop, leaving behind quite a lot of people to wait for the next bus (they come irregularly, but quite frequently. Sometimes you'll see three or four of the same bus line in rapid succession.) So for the rest of the ride, he's just decanting passengers, I guess until the end of the line when they'll try to fix the máquina.

And speaking of buses, I have something horrendous to show you. Shield your eyes if you're aesthetically sensitive.



Oh, the horror. This started happening last year. In the name of progress, some bus lines have traded in their stunning traditional graphics for ghastly modern digital displays. One look at that soulless blot of light and I might as well be in the Bronx.

(Speaking of which, the chic neighborhood here is Palermo. Over the years, it has expanded to included regions now called Palermo Soho and Palermo Hollywood by many. Amusingly, the newest extension has renamed a chunk of what used to be Villa Crespo as Palermo Queens.)