Travels in a Tin Can

dude, and when he stood up we got more than a glimpse of the sub-culture he
belonged to. His jeans were the extra baggy ones normally worn by pregnant
women but recently favoured by drug-filled youths, perhaps to make strip
searches easier? Anyway, his crotch was round his knees already but as the
bus jolted to a stop he let go of his Walkman and the headphones pulled out
of the socket. The Walkman then vanished inside his cavernous jeans, soon
reappearing at his feet. The 'dude' stooped to retrieve it and as he did his
jeans slipped off his hips and down past the bottom of his boxer shorts. 'Jailin'
at its best - or worse. We shared stifled laughter with our fellow travellers
before returning to studiously staring at our own feet.
However, the image of this guy with his trousers round his ankles
stayed with us the rest of the day - quite disturbingly. In fact, that evening we
tried an experiment to see if I could balance my trousers on my hips, sadly the
only way it worked was to have the flies slightly undone. The youth today
must have very tiny, but very pointy hips. Oh, and jeans with more material
than most parachutes. Dude!
At the start of this anecdote I used the phrase we 'chose to shun
private transport' in favour of buses and trains. To some extent this was true
and we did use it on occasion simply for the sheer danger involved, and the
chance of getting a good story. At other times however we did not have a
choice. For example in New York this was the case because had we not taken
the subway trains we would have either seen a lot less or had to curtail our
travels on account of wearing our legs down to stumps. As it was we nearly
wore through our shoes during our week in the Big Apple. Other factors that
caused us to take public transport were: expensive car parks, nightmare road