I’ve got to head downtown in about 90 minutes to meet Ethan. This is where the whole ‘fish out of water’ takes over; unfamiliarity breeds anxiety in me.

Our transport system back home isn’t exactly efficient, but it’s almost impossible to make any mistakes - you get on a bus at the front: left-hand side if you’re paying cash (the driver gives you a ticket), right-hand side if you have a prepaid ticket; you get a train at the station: you gotta buy a ticket at the office and then put it through the turnstile to get to the platform; you can’t transfer from one bus or one train to the other. (Unless you get on the wrong bus or something - that happened to me once, got on one bus at college thinking the one I wanted was gone, but then it showed up, and the driver was nice enough to print off a tansfer receipt without me even asking since I didn’t know they could do that - but it’s technically not the done thing.)

However, here they have a quite efficient system, but I haven’t the faintest idea what I’ll be doing. I don’t think drivers print off tickets for your journey, do they? You just drop your money in the thing and sit down, right? And this transfer business: what does the driver give you? What do you do with it when you do transfer to another bus or streetcar? I’m just so used to knowing how everything works, I don’t like to ask for help, it would draw attention to myself as the tourist or the outsider, even though I think nothing of it when visitors or newcomers to Dublin have to do the same thing.

I feel like an idiot.

Fri 15 Mar 2002 at 20:05   ·