Where do you go when you've been dumped by Greyhound in the Tijuana bus terminal at 4:00 am. Nowhere. That’s the stuffy truth to it. Fact is that there is no Greyhound in Mexico, only an affiliate bus company who are supposed to take Greyhound tickets and through some rudimentary refund process, place your butt in the seat of one of their buses. But it doesn’t quite work that way. In fact, after waiting for 8 hours, I still don’t know how it works.Spanish. If you don’t speak Spanish it’s like being handicapped 100 strokes in a game against Tiger Woods. I don’t speak Spanish. I didn’t realize my handicap till a little too late in the game. My Canadian sense of fairness tells me my ticket should have some bearing on the outcome. And truth be known I am banking on a little foreigner sympathy. Naivety doesn’t put my bum in a seat.
So much of the wait is about filling in my pointillist picture of assumptions based on gestures and facial expression. Paul Ekman’s study of faces in Emotions Revealed helps me when people are displaying the classic universal gestures – anger, fear, sadness, being thwarted; but 4:00 am in a Tijuana bus station is not a place or time to decipher the nuances of Latino facial gestures. Lesson - What I think I know probably isn’t happening. What is happening is a mystery. Crowds: It’s 3 days before Christmas. Mexicans are on the move. They are heading home to see families for the holiday. The bus station is jammed. My bus empties out into the international area of the bus station. Through the glass I see a long tall hallway with hundreds of travelers standing, sitting, and sleeping on luggage. It leaves me feeling stranded and helpless from the beginging. If this is where people are at when I arrive, is that going to be me in 5 or 6 hours, sleeping on the concrete floor winging for a bus?
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