It’s Christmas soon! Yay!

Since there isn’t much to do here is KL, I’m going back to my hometown, Ipoh, for Christmas! Believe me when I say Christmas is definitely my favourite festival of the year!

Because I don’t own so much as a bicycle in KL, I had to board an express bus with my friend instead. Well, not bad eh, express busses nowadays are tolerably comfortable, not all, but some are! It depends on your luck to get the good ones. Yes, you’ll get some proof later on…

So I was at the LRT station making my way to Pudu Raya with my friend, when I reached the ticket counter and was about to hand the payment for my ticket to the cashier, a curious sign caught my sight:

There was a bland notice in front of me, apparently asking me to say ‘thank you’!

At that very moment, I was actually dumb enough to think that it was probably that finally RapidKL had decided that their staff had endured enough of the public’s rudeness, thus putting up the sign to remind us, the customers, to say thank you.

Bewildered, I paid for my ticket, said ‘thank you’ courteously, perhaps too softly; and as usual, was ignored by the cashier.

After I walked out of the queue, only I realized that the sign was supposed to face the cashier, but was rotated to face the public when the cashier left the counter, overlooking the funny effect it caused. A small mistake, but if there are more dumb people like me buying tickets from them and misunderstanding the purpose of the notice, there’ll be more polite people in Malaysia! That’s good! XD

*****

We reached Pudu Raya and my friend was complaining about me not getting the tickets earlier since it’s Friday and going to be a long weekend, what can I do? Forgot mah…=)

We went counter-by-counter to all the express bus companies that we used to take, and all of them were like, “Eepoh ah? Tak de lagi lah!“. Suffering under the suffocating air of Pudu Raya and the weight of my bag, my friend went on hunting for tickets while I found a spot to wait, away from the crowd of ’salespeople’ screaming stuff like “Johor Johor Johor Johor Jooohhoooorrr sekarang sekarang sekarang! Leng Chai ah, pergi mana?….”.

Finally, my friend came back with the tickets and we hurried to get down to the platform; platform 19, if I remember correctly. 15 minutes pass the supposed ‘departure time’ of the bus, there was still no bus heading to Ipoh at the platform. Later, an old Chinese guy limped down the staircase and gathered us along with a few other people, apparently boarding the same bus as us, and signalled us to follow him up the staircase.

At that point, I knew what was coming.

The guy led us out of Pudu Raya, crossed the street, went up the road, and brought us to our long-awaited express bus:

Great! It is happening again, I paid RM20 to ride a Bas Sekolah!

It happened to me before, during festive seasons when the express bus companies do not have enough busses, but are determined to pocket your hard-earned money, they rent, I assume, Bas Sekolahs without registering with the Pudu Raya authority but charge higher fares from their customers. Great service!

They actually code-named the extra busses “101 bus”s. What a name.

Sighing and surrendering to fate, I boarded the bus and stepped into a realm I never expected to see:

You would think that you stepped into some old-fashioned disco or some sort…

An assortment of coloured lights were glowing on the ceiling, the place was surrounded by an indistinguishable disco music, people were sitting and talking… I readjusted my camera mode, and here you can see more clearly that it is actually the interior of the bus:

This bus had light bulbs of a variety of colours installed. I wonder what the bus would look like, viewing from the outside? Anyway, for those who still want to see the real interior, here’s a picture taken with a flash:

It was really worth paying RM20 just to have the chance to see the amazing surprises that the express bus industry has to offer its customers.

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