There are bus rides and then there are bus rides to remember.

I love the way a string of unrelated events can combine to make something absurd and ridiculous. It seems to happen a lot in Korea, I guess because there are so many more variables in this overpopulated city of Seoul. When it happens though - when the ridiculous occurs - I find myself on the verge of out-loud laughter. Like when the subway is so full that the bodies packed so intimately groan and whine, and I, a head taller than most have this most interesting perspective of a sea of uniform individuals mashed into one.

Bob, Dave, and I had met at the Thai restaurant in Itaewon for dinner. Bob’s last meal in Korea, it was. Around 8 or 8:30 we left there with pooching bellies and stood waiting for a long time at the bus stop, where we passed the time by observing an unusual Korean couple: A Korean woman dressed like a man was escorting a very tall and thin Korean woman who looked like she was a bar girl. And I mean she looked like a bar girl, literally, as many women are employed in that industry and after awhile it’s possible to tell at least sometimes who is a bar girl and who is not. They had been in the restaurant with us too. But here on the street we watched them enter into a clothing store where the tall woman tried on a dress and the woman dressed like a man played with the shop owner’s dog. It really was a strange site for Korea: As a heavily respected rule, people don’t mess around with gender roles. We couldn’t decide if they were friends or lovers, as it is common for people of the same sex to walk down the street holding hands. Still, it was a rare site, that woman dressed like a man.

But that’s not the ridiculous part, although now that I’m recalling it, it certainly adds to the stew. The absurdity began when the bus arrived:

It was an old green geezer that pulled up. We piled on and headed for the back seat where there was space enough for the three of us and the bags Bob and I had accumulated throughout the day. The way the back seats are set up in these buses is that on either side by the window is a single seat and the space in between is filled by one long one, so that if you sit on the end by the window you are actually sitting on your own seat separate from the others even though the whole back seat looks like one big long bench seat. Got it? Well, Bob occupied the end seat while Dave and I took up most of the middle section, which we quickly discovered had come halfway unattached from the bus. Every time the bus driver stomped on the brake, which was about every 5 seconds or so, our seat dove forward in attempt to eject us into the horizontal bar right in front of us. We had to hold onto the bar, keeping our arms outstretched and locked to prevent impact.

After sitting down, we noticed that the "let me off" buzzer was stuck. I guess the bus driver can set the buzzer to whatever is more pleasing for the individual, or maybe different buses come equipped with different buzzers, because sometimes it’s just a buzz and sometimes it’s a little song. A favorite is that one piano thing that every little kid learning to play piano performs for recital at least once. Right now the name is escaping me, but it’s the one where there are two notes alternated for a second or two and then it sort of drops into a nice melody that returns to the two notes and then it’s all repeated again. Know it? (As if.) Well, that’s what was playing on this bus and it was stuck. In its high-pitched electronic tones, it repeated over and over again, interrupted by the bus driver hitting a switch to snuff it whenever he had a free hand, which only accomplished starting it over again from the very beginning.

So there’s these two things as a baseline for the absurd: Our seat-cum-ejection apparatus and the incessant whine of that trite tune. Of course, our bus driver was driving like a maniac too, with one hand constantly hitting the button in a futile effort to quell the music, but that was not so unusual in itself other than it sort of exacerbated everything else.

OK, so while we were on the bridge crossing the Han river, a guy two seats up from Bob leans his head out the window and starts spitting. Bob is in oblivion, looking out his window at all the city lights. Dave and I notice the guy’s head out the window, and being familiar with Koreans and various behaviors, we start to speculate that this guy’s spitting isn’t so innocuous. And, just as we start mulling this over, the guy launches into full vomit. He had opened the window quite wide so his entire head could lean out, which meant that the width of the opening combined with the increasing speed of the bus over the uncrowded bridge provided just the force to propel some of the chunks of vomit not out onto the side of the bus, but up and past the guy’s head into the bus and onto the woman sitting directly behind him. Bob was sitting directly behind her and as soon as I realized what was happening, I grabbed Bob and scooted him over onto our rocket launcher seat.

The woman behind the guy must’ve had her eyes closed because she didn’t get out of the way. I saw that she had headphones in her ears, and probably she was shutting out the world. Of course that all changed when wet chunks started landing on her. It was over fast and I suspect she didn’t really have time to react. Thus, there she sat. We saw her flinch and even witnessed the look of disgust so wide on her face that we could detect it through the movement of skin on the back of her head. Gingerly, she picked chunks from her sweater and backpack, wiping them onto the back of the seat in front of her. She got out a small Kleenex pack - a requirement for living in Korea - and used some of those to work on the rest of the spray and to wipe her hands.

As soon as Bob snapped to attention and I told him what was going on, he started gearing up for a field day. He turned to me: Too much SOJA! (He means soju, but he got it wrong. Soju is Korean hard liquor and it is the national drink.) Then Bob turns to the bus full of passengers and yells, with arm outstretched and finger pointing menacingly at the guy, "TOO MUCH SOJA!!" followed by that laugh he has, which you know what I mean immediately if you are related to him.

Even before he could get it all out of his mouth, I put my hand up to his offensive arm and seethed a "Bob!" Dave too chimed in, "Bob! What the hell you doin?! We don’t do that here." Which is right. The last thing you ever want to do in this country as a foreigner, but even if you are Korean, is point your finger and yell at a stranger. (Of course, I wouldn’t do that anywhere.) Good grief.

Vomit guy got off at the very next stop. Chunk girl continued clean-up. Bob scooted back over onto his seat by the window. Dave and I continued to sit on the verge of ejection. Chunk girl eventually got off, revealing a spray of small chunks still stuck to the inside of the bus and to the seat where she was sitting. Other people came and went, some even sitting in the seat where the chunks were, not noticing. It made me think of how when you get on a train or bus and you sit in an empty seat, you never know what occurred there before you came. And sometimes you see stains on seats and you wonder what they are, how long they’ve been there, and you hope that someone just spilled a Coke.

Bob returned to staring out the window, but at one point decided he wanted a picture of the city lights. Leaning his head out the window while we were stopped at a busy intersection, he snapped off a shot, his flash reflecting off of the windshields below. And I lost it: Laughter poured forth and it wouldn’t stop. The image the car drivers must’ve had of this big white guy leaning out a bus window in the middle of an intersection, taking a picture with the flash still on, must’ve been choice. And all that other stuff that was going on too. Just priceless.