I did it my (tram)way

It’s Monday morning. You’re sleepy. And the least of the things you would do after sleeping in the prairies of your warm big bed is to have someone sitting on your side on a public transportation of Soviet produce.

It took me a while before developing such a technique. At least realizing that I did develop one and most of all thanks to the social attitude of the locals.

All it started because sitting by a window during Winter time on a Tallinn tram (henceforth just ‘tram’) is a bit of an hazard.

Air draughts are not compensated by the lonely heater a couple of rows ahead.
Having to ride few stops to my destination, it is not worth bothering someone else to get out.
The route is always the same, the view outside the window pane is memorized and sometimes the window is sold to a commercial banner that makes the view fragmented in pixels giving you a slight dizziness.

Therefore my choice went to the ‘aisle’ seat and to take a look at the human landscape that gets on and off the steep stairs of the sliding doors every morning.

You have the young student with his iPod well-fixed in the ears hollows. He won’t wear them off to listen the announcement that tram is going back to depot.
The young girl with freshly painted nails. You would bet that her nail style differs from week to week and it’s hard to keep track of.
The old Russian woman padded in her fur, furry laki-laki and thick square boots bought in keskturg making you feel like next stop might be the Red Square on a everyday tram ride in Soviet Moscow.
The old guy with red-face. Either too cold for him or too few resistance to a morning shot of viina.
The young kids going to school in their up-to-date street style wear. You think they don’t get into the class on their feet, they might skate in.
Some young yuppie with a ‘yes-I-use-public-transportation-but-not-everyday’ worried face. They look sad out of the window to colleagues flashing past in their SUV’s and BMW’s.

Morning tram spares you from the terror of every rider: the bum.

I don’t have anything against bums, they either chose this life or were compelled by drastic changes in their previous ones. What scares me is the non-arbre magic smell they carry with them. However they are enough intelligent to understand that using a tram at 9am would push all the other riders against the driver’s cockpit begging for shelter. Enough intelligent or too drunk to wake up.

Besides being drawn together by the terror for the abovementioned character, each rider has another common feature: avoiding human contact as much as possible and if possible.

I am not better than them.
I said: who wants to share a tiny padded seat with a perfect stranger not knowing his/her degree of personal hygiene? You might be sleepy, but you set your alarm clock at 7pm to take a shower and being acceptable in social situations; he/she might look already up-to it but maybe the bathroom was just crossed for a ‘quickie’.

However the developments were surprising.

I counted for 5 days in a row.
I was not certainly sitting on the back of the tram, but on the front where most of the people pack themselves. The tram (my line is either 4 or 3, from Tondi to the city center) gets packed quite quickly after a couple of stops reaching its climax (full capacity) in the very city center (Vabaduse väljak - Viru).

I was prepared to move my legs every morning as soon as someone demanded for the window place to be occupied, a little drawback to suffer.

Surprisingly this didn´t happen for 2 mornings in a row. The seat besides me stayed empty until destination was reached.
I started to think my route was too short for a serious statistical result.
Therefore I decided to make my trip a couple stops longer.
Nothing. The seat was still empty. And you cannot say people didn´t need it.
It seemed to me like I was physically blocking the only access to an empty seat. Had I found a way to make my trip comfortable and spare from an unnecessary companion? It seemed so. Therefore I started to implement my technique each and every time I was due to take a tram.
The results were confirmed: no one dared to ask me to make them a way to the empty seat, no matter they need it or not. It seemed like Estonians would suffer on their feet, carrying bags and pushed against each other rather than swallow their pride asking me to move a bit and let them in.
I do not certainly look like some kind of jailbird who just got off from the local vangla. Maybe a bit out of the ordinary with my brown hair and eyes, taken sometimes as a Russian-ethnic rather than a scary looking chap. Still very similar to any other dark-haired –eyed guy.
On the other hand I didn´t dare to break the golden rule of silence on the public transportation and offer an empty seat. I would have been labeled as a weirdo if not a perverted person in desperate need of company. I have learnt my lesson.

I made exception to old ladies as a basic rule of common sense and politeness.

However I noticed that I had very few to offer them. Despite the fact no one else is openly claiming that seat for themselves, the old grannies are used to fight for their seat and they do not need an invitation from you: ´Wanna seat? Of course I wanna seat you dumbass! My bones are as old as the October Revolution!´ they seem to think when they look at your Samaritan face.

The old ladies are the real exception to the ´empty window seat´ way to survive public transportation and make it safe to destination.

Whenever one of them climbs those steep stairs I am ready to surrender.