Bus Through Foreign City

You do not speak the language. And tonight, that is a relief.

The bus moves through the city in the dark. You are upstairs, if there is an upstairs, at the front, commanding the widest view. The other passengers, who do speak the language, have their phones out, their heads down. None of them are looking at the city the way you are looking at it.

They live here. The extraordinary is ordinary when it is yours. But you are a visitor. Everything is new.

A street market flashes past. Stalls lit by bare bulbs strung between them. Vegetables stacked in pyramids. A woman in an apron separating coins in a tin box. Gone in two seconds. The image lingers.

A man walks fast on the pavement below, briefcase, suited, talking on his phone with the intensity of someone solving a problem that cannot wait. He passes under a streetlight and out the other side and disappears into a doorway. His name is unknowable. His problem is unknowable. But for one second you were both in the same story, at the same instant, which is all any two strangers ever share.

The buildings change. Grand ones, faded now, their facades still carrying the ornament of the era that built them. Iron balconies. High windows. Doors twice the height of a person, leading to staircases that have been climbed by generations you cannot imagine. Then smaller buildings. Then a stretch of blank-fronted modern ones. Then grand again.

A restaurant full of people. Visible through the window as the bus stops at a traffic light. Conversations happening. Two people laughing at the same moment, leaning toward each other. An older couple sitting not across from each other but next to each other, side by side, looking outward, no need to look at a face you have seen for fifty years to feel its presence.

The light changes. The bus moves.

A river. The city's river, whatever it is called. The bus crosses a bridge and for fifteen seconds you are above dark water reflecting the lights of the buildings on both banks. Every city with a river is two cities, the real one and its reflection. Tonight both are visible.

You do not know where you are. Not specifically. You have the hotel's name. You have an approximate direction. But the specific streets, the neighbourhood names, the local knowledge, none of that is yours yet. You are navigating by impression. By feeling. The city as a sequence of images rather than a map.

And this, strangely, is when a city is most beautiful. Before it becomes familiar. Before it becomes the background of your routine. In this window of foreignness, when everything is noticed, when nothing is taken for granted, the city is vivid and full and giving you everything it has.

The bus slows. Passengers shuffle. You check your stop.

Not yet. Stay a little longer. The city is still talking.

...