New friends, new destination

A good friend of mine, Spencer, showed up in New York for a couple weeks to visit his brother. He had spent the past six months in Spain teaching English. After catching up for a few days in Manhattan, he mentioned he wanted to head to Washington DC, and that he knew about a cheap bus ticket we could snag. So, yesterday we hopped a cab to Chinatown, bought a couple strange pork sandwiches from an overenthusiastic street vendor, and purchased a pair of $35 roundtrip bus tickets to DC.

The bus was crowded, forcing Spencer and I to separate, although we remained in the same row. I didn't expect much from my first charter bus trip with complete strangers. Spencer sat next to an 18-year-old girl with a green mohawk. I sat next down to a woman in her late 20s who didn't look pleased when I asked if I could sit next to her, since she had all her things comfortably placed in the seat beside her.

We apologized to our new friends for the sandwiches we were about to consume, knowing they didn't have the most attractive look or smell. We proceeded to chat with our rowmates for the next four and half hours. We seemed to be the only people with voices on the bus. Tonya and Melissa seemed to get a kick out of our energy, like nobody should be this talkative on the Chinatown bus. We talked about nearly everything we could from relationships to life plans to Spencer's eye patch that he put on halfway through the trip as a "social experiment". We decided that everyone else on the bus hated us for being loud, but there was no law against it, so we continued on.

We rolled into DC around 6 p.m. Tonya said her mother's house was open for us if we had no place to stay. It was a very kind offer, but we already had plans to stay with Spencer's college friend. I hugged her goodbye and we exchanged email addresses, promising to stay in touch. She was a lawyer, so we joked that if we got arrested in DC we would call her.

Melissa, the 18-year-old with the green mohawk, knew her way around town and led us to the correct Metro terminal, showing us the route to take to our destination.

I just woke up to a cold but sunny DC morning. We plan to catch the bus back tomorrow, so our time for exploring is limited. I've never been to DC before. I always figured everyone had been there and seen the memorials and the statues, so I wouldn't be doing anything too unique by visiting. But I'm still curious about the town, and if anything, we made some new friends on the way down.