Professional Bus Passengers

For our last day in LA, we decided to go to Century City. Earlier we've taken a cab everywhere we went, but this time, we wanted to try out the LA public transportation. We was going to take a bus! I gotta admit, I never take a bus, not in Norway and certainly not in LA. But as I remember it as a kid, it worked like this: enter the bus, tell the driver where you are going, pay what he ask for and sit down til the destination is reached. Right? Nhahaa. Not quite how it works.

The bus arrived, we went on. At first the driver didn't even looked at us, so I said "Century City..?". He said "yeah?", still not looking. After a very awkward pause, he added "1.50". I held the money up. Then the guy looked at me with a very strange, but kinda cool facial expression: "dude, what are you trying to do??" and I was like "well...I'm trying to pay you..." Suddenly I guess the driver realized that he had to deal with stupid foreigners on a LA bus for the first time in their life's, so he showed us that we had to put the money into a money automate thingy (which of course spitted out the paper money three times, just to make the situation even more painful than it already was). We finally sat down and believe me, payed very very close attention to how the people that got on the bus did it.

We had a great time in Century City and when we were going back home, we went onto the bus, put the money (which this time were coins) onto the automate, nodded kindly to the driver, he nodded back and we sat down. We knew how to do this by now - we're professional LA bus passengers :)