Yet another bus story...

I suppose public transportation can really be a source of enlightenment... Who knows?

Imagine a situation... Rush hours in the evening... A bus is full of people... On one of the stops two charming elderly ladies in their late 80s enter the bus. Some people get up to give them their seats. They are coming back from a dinner and actively discussing  nice time they spent together with other ladies...

I look at them with admiration, because not in many countries elderly people can enjoy such an active and fulfilling life like here in Europe... They caught my attention and I contuniue musing about them, imagining how they looked like when they were the same age as I am now and how will I look when I get in my 80s...

The attention of the ladies however, caught two Asian girls (most likely exchange students at the local University), who were sitting across the aisle... And the following dialogue in German takes place:

Lady A: I think It's so difficult to read Asian faces, you never know if they are happy or not.
Lady B: Yes, I do agree with you and it is also very difficult to tell how old they are...

All this is being said relatively loud, for naturally my dear ladies cannot hear that well and it is loud on the bus. The Asian girls hear the whole conversation and start giggling in their own language, for they understand everything which was said. I can see  from their reaction that they are totally amused... I smile too and contunue to muse... My thoughts, this time make me travel in time to a similar situation on the train in Scandinavia. I was reading a book written in Cyrillic alphabet. In front of me there were two women in their 40s and we were facing each other, so they could see my book:

Conversation in Danish:
Lady A to Lady B: What kind of language is this?!
Lady B: I have no idea...
Me (smilingto both of them) and replying in Danish: "It's Russian"...

...It brings me yet to another train situation in Italy, when one of my closest friends and I  were travelling from Assisi back to Rome one October evening. Since we do not share the same linguistic background we spoke English. We got seats by the table where 4 people can be seated facing each other. In front of us was a group of loud youngsters who were making fun of us. I understood that something was going on, yet since I do not speak Italian I couldn't know all the details. I asked my friend, who spoke absolutely impecable Italian for he studied in worked in Rome for some years back then and he promised to tell me all about it once we got off the train. All he could wisper to me was that the youth were thinking that we are Albanians and somehow this was an amusing fact for them and they were discussing us...

The train was totally full, there was no single free place. On one of the station just after Assisi an elderly lady came in and my friend, being a true gentleman, got up and gave her his seat. The lady started to thank him heartedly in Italian. After she finished prasing him, he said one short sentence in Italian without a slightest foreign accent: "Where I was raised, it is very normal to give a seat to a lady"... It suddenly became very silent across the table and the youngsters haven't pronounced a single word all the way to Rome...

Curtain down...

...Oh! Assumptions, Assumptions! What do you do to us?! How many evil jokes you play on us humans?! How many times you lead us astray and let us live an illusion?..