Wednesday, April 1, 2015

The Perfect Time for Shopping- The Rush Hour




             Public transportation can serve as a perfect place for ethnographic observations, of course not in a strictly scientific way, but it still can reveal some interesting behavioural patterns in a society. In Hungary, it is a common and favoured way of maintaining or initiating a conversation by complaining about something, – and public transportation is an ultimate subject of public discontent. However, besides of our negative sentiment and our love of complaining as Hungarians, the problem of transportation does not only lie in the poor condition of the vehicles or the underdeveloped system of ticket inspectors but also in the attitudes of people while commuting.
            In Hungary, similarly to other countries, the most frustrating, uncomfortable, crowded and annoying times of travelling by means of public transportation are the rush hours of the morning on weekdays. However, some people find this time of the day the most appropriate time for doing the shopping. According to my experiences and observations, which I gained mostly during my high school years, pensioners tend to do their daily shopping in the morning rush hours.
            The bus that I had to take to get to my high school also touched upon three other schools and a marketplace. Besides being a relatively infrequent route, it was a small kind of bus. However, these hardly negligible factors did not divert the elderly from taking this forty-minute route to a marketplace during the most crowded hours of the day, and in the heaviest traffic. An important observation that I made at that time, and I usually face with it nowadays as well since at university I do not have early classes, is that from about  10 a.m. to noon this route is not crowded at all, with plenty of free seats and suitable level of personal space. However, pensioners do not choose this time of the day for travelling to their shopping destination, and prefer the same hours as those who have to keep themselves to a constructed time schedule, whether because of school or workplace and have no other time option.
            Interestingly, this habit is not uncommon; I have heard the same complaints from several people. The problem of this phenomenon was not only the crowdedness but also the mean remarks and complaints elderly people gave voice to during the route. It was quite annoying to be crammed into an airless bus, pushed onto the windows, trying to rescue your feet from under the weight of a shopping bag on wheels while listening to the condemnation of your generation. Not to mention the outrage arisen by a seat taken by someone under the age of thirty.
            Naturally, the situation of pensioners could be understood, too, especially if we take into consideration that they have a different biorhythm and they tend to get up early in the morning. Moreover, in many countries people commute in incredibly crowded vehicles compared to Hungarian ones, for example, in Japan.
             Nevertheless, I think the problem lies in that common Hungarian sentiment which neither takes into consideration the situation of others, nor cares about it too much. In this issue of shopping in the rush hours, I recognize this ignorant and selfish attitude from pensioners towards those who have to make their way to work or school. I think if there was an underlying and unwritten convention concerning the preferences of commuters it would make public transportation much easier and also comfortable for both the elderly and the youth or active workers. I think these nuances, which I think are also very logical, could improve the opinions of both the elderly and the youth about each other thus reducing the tensions between the two age groups.

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