The rutiera (marshrutka
in Russian) is the major vehicle of public transporation. Its official name is the microbuz. It is actually a Mecedes made vehicle called
the Sprinter. It is usually made with
twenty passenger seats. Often the number
of people riding this vehicle is doubled by the number of standees. The most I’ve ever counted is 45. The
two rear doors provide some opportunity to place baggage under the rear bank of
seats from outside the vehicle.
Otherwise there are some ceiling racks above the seats for smaller
items. The driver is the only one with a
seat belt.
The roads in
Moldova are very bad. Some of the major
highways are close to smooth service level, but most are not. The roads are so full of potholes, drivers
often cross the center line to go around a bad hole in their part of the
road. It baffled me at first how two way
traffic could share the road if the primary goal was to avoid pot holes first,
and stay on your side of the road second.
When those two objectives were in competition, I didn’t know how drivers
decided when to assert and when to defer to other vehicles.
Given the bad condition of the roads, one is
often not surprised to find that the windshield has a crack in it. I’ve seen so many cracked ones that I assume
the use of that super glue sealer used in the States on cracks is also
available here.
The space
for legs in a rutiera is often less than required by today’s adult. (I fantasize that the designers were either
expecting children or Japanese people as riders.) I find it best to have an aisle seat where I
can let one leg sneak space from the aisle.
There are some seats in the rutiera that are last choice for sure. The seats that hover the rear wheels
definitely have less leg room. And the
rear bank of seats can be murder on the back when bumps and holes are hit hard.
There’s an
etiquette in Moldova about who gets a seat.
The elderly get priority as well as women vs a man. Women who are pregnant or with smaller
children have a higher priority.
Sometimes, if a mother comes on with small children and all seats are
filled, people will offer their laps to the younger children. As there is often a number of standees on the
rutiera, seated people will often offer to hold packages or large bags that
standees have to juggle so they can have two hands to hold on.
The driver
often has music on as the vehicle is in operation. This is often the popular folk music of
Moldova, but it can also be Russian or English pop rock. The payment of fares happens in various
patterns. Some local rutieras on a city
route will expect you to pay as you enter the vehicle. Many rutiera drivers who have a single
destination will simply collect the fare as the passengers depart. What was interesting for me was the process
where someone gets on that needs to get change from a larger bill to pay their
fare. The passenger will give the driver
the bill and proceed to their seat or place in the rutiera. The driver will make change as he is able
(depending on the driving situation) and
pass the change back by hand to the passenger via the other passengers.
The rutiera
driver will let you off just about anywhere you want, but you need to start to
work your way up to the front in time to verbally make the request to “get
off” (coborit) before he gets to your
stop. If the rutiera is full of
standees, this can be more than a little challenging.
There is a
strange human dynamic as the rutiera fills up.
For some reason the people towards the rear of the vehicle never feel
obliged to squeeze themselves tightly as more people get on at the front. The driver will say, “move on back please”;
but it’s the people in front who keep on compressing their space so one more,
or five more, people can get on after you’d think we had reached the maximum
number possible. The concept of personal
space is definitely a luxury not affordable in most situations. One is often surprised how intimate people
have to become in order to get from place to place.
People often
are carrying bags of goods when they ride the rutiera. These would be items they just purchased at
the market and were returning home with.
Often I have seen people bring long thin wood quarter round or Styrofoam
trim boards on the bus. They thread them
through the front door and try to line them up in the overhead racks or along
the window side of the seats. When
someone is bringing fresh fish home from the market, the smell of fresh fish
fills the air. And sometimes people
bring live animals on board such as chicks in a box, or a live hen for supper. Once I saw a man standing in the aisle with a
live chicken under his arm. The head of
the chicken was looking direcly at the ear of the person seated on the aisle
seat.
The windows
of the rutiera do not open. There
usually are two air outlets in the center ceiling of the vehicle. The two front doors do have standard roll
down windows. These are rarely
lowered. This limit on ventilation is
usually most critical in the summer when the air temperature can be over mid
70’s outside. No, rutieras are not air conditioned. Given the crowded nature of most rutieras, the
heat in the summertime can be challenging.
To top it off, Moldovans have a belief that the “current” or draft of
air can bring illness. So one can be in a
hot, crowded rutiera and there will be some life saving air coming in from the
ceiling vent and a passenger will complain about the current and ask that the
air vent be closed.
Almost
everyone in Moldova has a cell phone. It
is always fun to listen as you ride the rutiera to the various ring tones in
use. Occasionally you will come across
the high tech user who has ear phones and is listening to their own music. Or sometimes you find a game player involved
with a video game. But usually, the
Moldovan phone call is quick. A few “da’s”
and “hai da vai.” A favorite trick of
people who want to talk to you is to call and quickly hang up. This gives you their number as a missed call
and they can talk to you on your dime when you call them back.
No comments:
Post a Comment