Overheard: "Would You Like to Talk?"
There's this rule in Vancouver that while on transit, if there is no friend or lover or someone-that-you-know of yours sitting or standing next to you, you do not, under any circumstances, talk to a stranger on a transit bus. This rule is violated at great risk. Not any type of risk that is has any real implications, but imagined risk. I've talked to a stranger at least once that I can recall: it was on my way home from something downtown, when I noticed a young lady reading a Mandarin Chinese textbook, either studying for an upcoming quiz or brushing up. It was the same textbook that I had used when I studied the language 3 years earlier before heading off to China for a couple of months. We made eye contact, and I pointed to the book asking if the professor I had was still teaching the introductory-level class for which the textbook was written. (By the professor of the class herself.) She said that yes, the professor was still teaching the class, and we made the usual small-talk that one makes when one finds out that a white guy studied Chinese for a while. I'll save you the suspense and tell you that no, I did not get her phone number.
That was not an audacious way to start a conversation. Here was a pretty girl with a book for a class that I took, so right away we had something in common about which to talk. The other day I saw—and tried to overhear as much as possible—what is rare these days in this city that the good lord has forsaken, for more reasons than that people don't talk to each other on the bus. As much as I wanted to go to the back of the bus and find a way to talk to the girl in the cute yellow pants who smiled at me—twice no less: I give credit to a certain type of shirt that I've been wearing lately—at the bus stop we got on at, a conversation-starter I overheard made me forget about her.
On articulated buses in Vancouver, and surely in other cities as well, some seats in the middle of the front half face each other. I missed how it all started, but two people, a man and a woman, said a few words to each other, and he noticed that the woman had a book in her hands. She seemed to have in her mind that when you go on a bus, if you aren't going to space out, you need to bring a book to pass the time. Noticing that she had something she could use if she didn't want to talk to someone, the man sitting next to her asked her about the book and then said (and I quote verbatim) "Would you like to talk?" So not only did he violate the rule that you do not initiate a conversation with a stranger on the bus, he asked whether she would rather not. She decided, rather shrewdly if you ask me, to talk to the guy, since at least from a heterosexual guy's perspective, he was a fine-looking gentleman. I did overhear "so where are you from?" which suggested to me that instead of being acquaintances to begin with, they were indeed strangers. The "nice meeting you" at the end confirmed this, although he did say "don't forget what I said" just as she left the bus, which suggested that this conversation would have been really worth overhearing.
Another remarkable aspect of that conversation is that, during their conversation, two friends had just got on the bus, and one sat down in between the man and the woman. Her friend would have been standing if it weren't for the guy on the other side who gave up his seat and sat a few seats down. The man who our principle subject at the moment said loud enough for everybody to hear "so there are gentlemen left", to which the man who gave up his seat shrugged with humility.
Finally this woman with whom the man had initiated a conversation left, and as audacious as that was, the man proceeded to talk to the girl who sat down between them! Another woman (this is the fourth woman to enter the conversation with the man in less than 20 minutes) had overheard the conversation, found enough of a lull, then asked the birthday girl how her birthday was going because it was the woman's birthday as well!
This rule—that you do not talk to strangers on the bus—irritates me to no end. (That, along with the fact that nobody says Hi to each other when they pass on the sidewalk. If you grew up in a small town like me, you'll know what I'm talking about.) This rule does not seem to exist in America, where strangers, almost every time I've been on public transit or the coach traveling between cities, have found a way to talk to me about something. The first time was the convicted felon on my way down to Portland. The second time was the guy with the Dr. Dre CD in his Discman (identifiable because of the marijuana leaf on the cover), the third time being the disabled man talking to me about how Vancouver and Portland differ in terms of wheelchair access on transit (inaccessible if you want to ride the trolley's downtown) and the black girl with a cold, whom I thought was crying at first—from Portland to Seattle. An American friend and I conferred about the conversation I overheard, and before I had a chance to suggest it, he asked "was he American?"
I'll never know, but it's always interesting to watch people who violate what everybody else believes to be an established social principle and watch the success—in this case, actually talking to the pretty girls on the bus rather than imagining what might have been—that comes from violating that principle.