Kindness.

Kindness.

When you take public transport you see a lot of weird, questionable and crazy things. With that said you also see a lot of really great things. Vancouver is a hard place to meet people and make friends but I find it is a very friendly city full of really kind people.

Just last week I was waiting to take the bus home when I noticed two women chatting. From the looks of it, it appeared to be two old friends catching up after a long day. One woman was sharing her frozen cherries and asking her if she wanted her unopened smoothie drink. Although, after listing to the conversation they were two strangers who had shared a love for frozen cherries. The one woman was kind enough to share her food and drink with someone she didn’t know, simply because she wanted to.
The bus came and everyone got on, the two women said goodbye to each other and took different seats. The one woman who was sharing her food didn’t end up bringing a bag big enough for all of her items and things kept falling to the floor. A nice young man pointed out she dropped something and handed it back to her. After a few moments, she had dropped her bag of frozen cherries. She then picked up every last frozen cherry she dropped and took her seat again. Another older Asian woman had taken out a plastic bag from her purse and handed it to her.

When your car breaks down on a busy street, it’s never a good thing. Especially if it’s on Burrard St and Dunsmuir St, at 5:00pm on a Friday and you’re an older women of about 70 years old.
Many people walked past her car parked in the cross walk, on the corner, but also in the bus lane. After about 5 minutes a man came and asked if she needed help. She did, her car stopped working and she didn’t know what to do. This man then got her to put her car in neutral, and began pushing the car up the street to Melville St and out of the traffic. Three other men came to help this guy out in pushing the car up and out-of-the-way.

I see small acts of kindness and large ones all over the city. Like the many people who give up their seat on the bus or train to someone in need or that small child who wants to look out the window. Or the person who picks up a dropped shoe for a mom instead of walking over it. Holding open a door for someone simply because you can.

Vancouver is a great place to live and it has its moments of crazy on public transport but its reasons like these that I actually enjoy taking the bus.

All the best,
Bailey B.