892: Trapped on a Bus
7/19/20261 hr 3 min
People on journeys they did not intend! Or agree to!
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- Prologue: A woman on a nighttime bus ride wakes up to discover the bus driver is taking the passengers somewhere none of them want to go. (8 minutes)
- Act One: Sometimes, the bus ride you're stuck on, against your will, is the thoughts spinning around in your own mind. (13 minutes)
- Act Two: A dispatch from Cuba, where there are not a lot of buses running right now because the whole country is out of oil. (11 minutes)
- Act Three: Sometimes, an entire country can be taken on an unexpected journey against its will. That happened in England, where a crime occurred that was so confounding, so nonsensical, that people just could not wrap their heads around it. (15 minutes)
- Act Four: Someone trapped…not on a bus…but on a plane! When she was 16, Leticia flew from Sao Paolo, where she lived, to Germany. She was seated next to an older woman who did something so surprising during the flight that Leticia still tells people about it today. (9 minutes)
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First 90 secondsSpeaker 10:00
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David Kestenbaum· Host0:18
A quick warning. There are curse words that are un-beeped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm David Kestenbaum, sitting in for hourglass.
Aviva DeKornfeld0:35
This morning on the subway- Yeah ... this guy brought his own chair. [laughs] [laughs] I was sitting next to him, but he was in, like, a fold-out chair.
David Kestenbaum· Host0:45
That's Aviva Dekornfeld, apparently our transportation correspondent. She came in the studio to tell me a story about a woman on a bus ride that went very strangely.
Aviva DeKornfeld0:54
Um, her, her name's Duck, or that's her nickname. That's what we're gonna call her.
David Kestenbaum· Host0:58
Okay.
Aviva DeKornfeld0:59
She takes this, this bus between New York and DC a lot back and forth. So on this trip, she's going from New York to DC, Union Station, and she's leaving around 6:00 PM at night, and she has this whole routine around the bus because she's done this trip a million times. This is Duck. I'll go, get a margarita, get on the bus, take a nap, wake up back home [laughs] in DC. You know, I boarded the bus as normal. They checked me in. You know, the guy had the app with all the