This One Time, In Thailand…
If you’re like me, you once accidentally hijacked a Thai school bus at 5:00 pm in order to meet a professor in the next town over. Let me wind that back a bit.
When I was in college, I had the opportunity to study abroad in Thailand. For an entire semester I lived and went to school about as far away from Northern Illinois as you can get. It was an international campus so the 18 Millikin University students plus myself and two professors were the only native English speakers on campus. This made for a fascinating cultural experience. As you hopefully have surmised by now, it presented a challenge or two as well.
Because very few of the students had the ability to drive in a foreign country, the school had set up a regular bus schedule for the students running from the campus, the housing accommodations, and a couple stops in town. Turns out, many organizations have similar set ups. I should also mention that they don’t have yellow school buses. Every bus was a charter bus with a different billboard advertisement on the side. Catching the right bus was often a matter of faith and precise timekeeping.
We had been in the country for a few weeks when the professors we brought with us recommended that we meet them in the city for dinner and to see how everyone was doing. About half of our group trekked out to our designated bus stop and waited. The bus pulled up a few minutes later and we hopped on with me at the very end.
I noticed two things when I got on the bus. 1. It was really crowded. 2. It was crowded with young children in uniforms. Before I could ask the driver what was going on, the bus took off, luckily in the general direction we wanted. Most of my classmates had found a seat next to the children. I don’t know which group looked more panicked.
I tried to get information out of the driver, but his English was choppy and my Thai was worse. Somehow, we were able to conclude that the bus would eventually take us where we needed to go but there would be several stops along the way as he dropped off the children. We could ride along, for a price.
We freeloaders pulled out our pockets, put together a fare that seemed, well, fair and passed it up. A smile on the drivers face told me we would at least be allowed to stay on. The trick then became figuring out where he was taking us in a foreign country at night where even the familiar landmarks were unrecognizable.
A gas station, a train station, an open field, we even dropped a kid off at a zoo if memory serves. Keep in mind this was all after 5:00 at night. Most places looked closed, but these kids jumped off with their backpacks and would presumably return to these places in the morning.
After taking 40 minutes for a 20-minute drive, we made it to downtown Hua Hin. We paid the driver and let the remaining children continue home. We did eventually find our professors at an Irish pub owned by a father & son expatriate team but that’s an entirely different story.
I’m not sure what the point of this story is. You can take what you like from it. Having been there, it always makes me smile. Sometimes stories are like that though. There’s no villain, no lesson, just a tale of people finding their way through an odd situation.
