When will you change? When will you change your neighbors? When?

Get in on the ground floor (la parter) , folks.

If you (or someone you know) have money, there’s still time to seize an opportunity to establish what could be one of the wildest night clubs along the Danube. High revenue, low cost of living, relatively cheap labor, and a surrounding population hungry for something cool.

Imagine a terasa with dozens of tables spread across the grass. Three (count ‘em: 3!) stories of indoor baruri for upscale clients sipping on exotic cocktails and admiring the beautiful view of the riverside port. Throw a live DJ up top in the loft for entertainment.

With just a minimum of promotion, it’d be a sensation drawing Romanian and Serbian tourists from all over. Run the lethargic teens through a crash course in real customer service protocol and you could have a cash machine on your hands.

I suppose you might have to spread a few peanuts around to the local cops and small pond politicians to keep spirits high. And, yeah, sure, you’d need to get your hands a little dirty at the outset to polish the place up. But someone is going to do it.

It could be you.

In the US, the traditional way to pay for metro bus fare is when you board the vehicle. You enter only from the front door near the driver, not the rear door. If you have a pre-paid monthly pass, you swipe it. Otherwise, you put cash into the collection device until it beeps happily. Exact change preferred.

Pretty simple, eh? Get on the bus. Pay.

The potential for any fiduciary shenanigans is severely curtailed by the absence of human exchange. Your bus pass was prepaid on the internet. If you’re paying cash, you toss coins into a machine that rapidly counts the total value. Ding!

Now, I walked you through that for the sake of contrast.

In Romania, the foreigner is often puzzled by the rituals of public transportation.

Tiny, non-descript signs indicate bus stops, though non-locals will never see such signs. The best bet for a traveler is to locate any large collection of loitering citizens. They’re either hitchhiking or waiting for a bus. Either way, it involves wheels.

If it does turn out to be a bus stop, the ride protocol initiates with jostling in close proximity. Children will rush between your legs. Grown men will shove you from behind. Old women will step on your feet as they slip past you in the shuffle. It’s all out combat as the bus rolls to a stop.

Tourists may note, between pinballesque shovings, there are multiple fronts in the war. Any place which might conceivably be a door is bumrushed by the crowds. Front, back, even center if the bus has 3 doors. Any port is fair game.

The primary objective of those outside the bus is to block any passengers from exiting the vehicle. By not letting any people get off the bus, entrants hope to claim a free seat.

Sound backwards? Not really. There is a tactical imperative to the strategy of obstruction. The bunicas, who prove Darwin’s theories by standing point guard on the surging would-be riders, communicate telepathically in order to coordinate a simultaneous backward lean.

Having been given 4 to 6 mm of leeway, the outbound passengers stampede ashore with the force of their exist knocking back the throngs of boarding people. A mosh pit breaks out as the two sides seasaw back and forth.

When the majority of debarked (that’s right! not everyone makes it off successfully), then the chaos flops forward precariously. They key is to leap in the air about a half meter from the bus, just in time for the people behind you to give you a good thrust. The resulting trajectory should arc you more or less inside the autobus.

Don’t bother looking for seats. There’s no way you had the experience or stamina to manhandle the cattle necessary to claim victory. They’re all taken. Age and gender and civility have no place here. First come, first serve. We have communism to thank for this equality.

Of course, you won’t be quite the last to board. When the driver grinds the transmission into a crunchy first gear, the ancient beast belches its’ displeasure and lurches forward under the strain of being overburdened.

You’ll notice the doors don’t necessarily close prior to motion as it makes good sport for passengers to bet on which of the persons running down the block in your general direction might have the athletic ability to fling themselves at the moving target and find some edge to dig their fingers nails into to keep from falling out to their death.

Alas, the show comes to an end. Collect your winnings or pay your debts, accordingly. We move onto the next stage: the realization you’ve been outfoxed by the clever folks on the side of the bus who do not have 4000 degrees of solar heat magnified by window glass. You’ll learn to appreciate the scientific process of maximum cloth saturation as you sweat like şaorma on the spit.

Click, click. Turn and notice most of the adults (not teens) are sliding ribbons of paper into a mechanical hole punch. Ah, self validation of their tickets. The honesty system, in effect. Afterall, the odds of being caught by the wily and elusive ticket inspector on one of his/her rare trips aboard the bus are slim to none. Next to impossible.

Panic! You didn’t buy a ticket, did you, foreigner?

“Ticket?”

Oh, yeah… no one told you how that works. See, in random locations scattered throughout the city (but never where you happen to be) are invisible salespersons selling tickets through portals from the 5th Dimension. Your challenge is sense the magnetic disturbance in the air caused by the presence of undetectable bus ticket kiosks, then take the inverse derivative of the cosign value of relative variance from the mean which will give you the WGS84 latitude…

Right. So teens sneak on the bus knowing they’re unlikely to get into trouble. Adults tend to pay for tickets out of some sense of civic duty. No order is really enforced or promoted. Your crime of being born elsewhere will result in your being a public transportation scofflaw in a foreign land.

What a jerk, you’ve become. You and all the rest of the disrespectiful tourists from just about any other part of the world. Worthless as a dog’s fleas leeching off the rest of society.

Travel tip: Wanna get around town easily and cheaply? Look for any dark box bearing an unspectacular sign with the word RAT in blue. Find that RAT and you’ve found the magical happyland where tickets are sold. Now, if you don’t speak Romaneste at all, buying said tickets will be the most entertaining aspect of your bus experience…