Discrimination

So the roller coaster continues.

I've had a rough couple of days.  It's not so much homesickness, this time, and it seems to be abating some.  I also had my very first run in with discrimination against women.  Yesterday, before I very unwisely invited a friend to come study with me at my adoptive family's house, we went to get on a bus to get there.  A bus is essentially fifty cents, where a taxi is 2 dollars.  I almost always take it home if I leave from the University in the evening.  On Sundays, however, this is always a difficult experience.

To the bus system's credit, during rush hour, there are buses along every couple of minutes.  All the students form UJ get out at this time, so it is not uncommon for there to be hundreds of people at the main gate, waiting to get on the bus.  Yesterday was the first time they decided to segregate the sexes, and guess which one went first?  And, guess which one could get on the wrong bus, and it not be a problem.  If you said men got their own girl cootie free bus, you'd be right.  Three guys got on the female bus, and that was not a problem.  There were literally 3x as many women as men there, so I can only assume it had been going on some time before I got there, and all the men were of course serviced first.

The female bus rolled up, and there were so many women that they were standing in the street.  The bus didn't care, just slowly started driving into the mass of people, and to get on, you had to follow the door to wherever the guy decided to stop.  We are talking people literally pressed up against the side of the bus while it was slowly moving.  It reminded me of standing concert "seats" where the people in back are constantly pressing against you to get closer to the stage.  One of the couple guys that got on the girl bus, and he seemed to be thoroughly enjoying the fact that I was getting squished into him.  The main guy "organizing" the loading of people kept beating the side of the bus to frighten the women away from it, like we were cattle.  The sad thing is that many women flinched away, presumably because it was gun shot loud, and they were actually afraid.

My friend and I got on the bus, and some other women told the bus driver that we did not pay, which was of course untrue.  They actually pointed us out, and the bus driver came back to the bus to accuse us.  We told him we paid and he didn't make an issue of it, but it gave me pause.

There seems to be a shift going on here.  I really don't know what it is about, but my adoptive family has told me that I am now Canadian, and it's not a good idea to be American anymore.  This, in the most technical sense, is actually true, so I can hold to my honesty commitment, even though there's still paperwork standing between my husband assuming his inherited Canadian status, and me attaining it through our marriage.  No one has a bone to pick with Canada, and people are friendlier to Canadians.  I did not experience this before, but recently I've noticed less friendliness now when people assume I'm American.  I meant to ask my adoptive family yesterday, but it slipped my mind.  The whole thing makes me uncomfortable.