update: bus bloopers

So here's another thing that can happen while you're riding a bus: you can be riding merrily along, rather drowsily just before midnight, not noticing a thing and suddenly realize that the bus has stopped. Not stopped as in at a traffic light, but stopped as in pulled over, turned off the engine and the driver's popped out to have a smoke break. After awhile, the other passengers begin filing out so you mosey along with them and find that most the rest of them are also having a smoke break and everyone's just sort of milling about. As best you recall, this is not standard bus behavior, but you are, after all, in a foreign country with potentially different protocols. Many of the inhabitants do like to smoke, though in your past experience they haven't stopped traffic to do so.

You start catching snippets of conversation and begin to piece together that, while you were riding merrily along, someone else had hopped on, not paid, been told to leave and promptly punched the driver. (Amazing what you can daydream through.) You'll hang about as there aren't many other options and wait with the others until the police come and the driver makes an official report and warns everyone about the man in a checked shirt who ran off that way and then wait some more and then continue waiting.

Even though the driver looks none the worse for the wear, he has suddenly been rendered incapable of driving and instead must depart to the depot and put together an Official Report of the Incident, which is vitally more important than driving sleepy passengers home. (The man in the checked shirt must not go free!) He does, however, manage to wait with them, generally enjoying his new-found fame, and wait some more, until finally the relief bus comes toddling along and you board it and arrive home an hour and a half after you left your Thanksgiving feast.