commute
today is the first day of my month of vacation. woohoo! i'll be spending a lot of my time off working, but i think i'll be working from home for the most part. no need to make the trip across the bay every morning and evening during rush hour.
after my first week of growing increasingly tense driving in and out of the city and sitting through traffic, i finally figured out my commute.
morning
walk ten minutes to BART station
stand in casual carpool line and get into stranger's car
ride 20 minutes in stranger's car into the city
get on free shuttle which takes me straight to work
evening
ride free shuttle to BART station
ride BART back over to berkeley
walk ten minutes home
i'm so much happier now that i don't have to drive. it takes the same amount of time, and it's so much calmer to sit back and let someone else take me to and from work. plus i get to walk, and then i don't feel like my rear end is getting larger and larger and fused to the car seat. plus, after seeing an inconvenient truth, i'm really happy to do my part in taking public transportation and carpooling into work. if you haven't seen the movie yet, please do.
so the casual carpool...i'd heard of the concept before but it is so beautiful to see it in action. it's an amazing system. random people stand in a designated spot, random cars pull up and pick up two people, and then they ride across the bridge together, skipping over paying the $3 toll, but more importantly skipping over all the traffic of people waiting to pay the toll. and the whole thing works without any organization setting it up. it's beautiful. i've been both a rider and a driver and i love it. at first i thought it would be a little weird sharing the ride with a stranger, but it's not at all. part of the whole culture is not to speak. which is fine, cause then there isn't any awkward small talk. love it.
by the way, i'm pumped to go see step up, the latest in the line of cheesy dance movies i love. i only wish i had a girlfriend here to see it with. something tells me khalid is not going to be so excited about this one.
Comments
isn't that a little weird to drive so far without saying a word? do you turn on the radio, or do passengers do paperwork in the back seat?
Posted by: cynthia | July 31, 2006 08:18 AM
i thought it might be, but it isn't. we listen to the radio, or sometimes riders just read or do work. and we do speak sometimes. it is not nearly as awkward as you might think.
Posted by: meisa | July 31, 2006 01:42 PM