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So recently, within the my last month in Kazakhstan, I had a strange bus situation.  I've been riding the bus here for two years.  It costs 35 tenge to ride the bus.  It has cost this from day one and I've known this since day one.  I've paid with bills up to 1000 tenge, which even I feel bad doing.  Locals have no problem handing the teenage money collector a 5000 tenge bill and expecting change.  Let me back up here.  The bus is worked by two people.  The driver, who is off limits unless you are a young, "easy" girl or an old man acquaintance.  Then they chat and chat and chat and I fear that we will die because they never seem to pay enough attention to the insane traffic.  The second person, the 'conductor', goes around and collects fares and shouts the bus stops at us and at people wanting to get on.  So the conductor can be anyone.  A 90 year old lady, a 12 year old boy, one of my students (that was an awkward bus ride), or any type of person you can imagine.  I mean from models to trolls to excessively pregnant women.  They aren't too choosy in the hiring office apparently.

Anyway, these people squirm around in the OVERLY OVERLY OVERLY (I can't even begin to explain how stuffed some of these buses are—think the photos of Japanese people getting pushed onto trains) packed buses collecting money.  I give exactly change as often as possible, even though this is a pain in the ass and requires THREE separate coins.  I've never had a problem EVER with getting change or anything really.  I've gotten lost but that's normally my fault.

So this one time it's a typical young Kazakh guy conductor and he refuses to talk to me.  He sees through my local dress and somehow guesses I am foreign (or in retrospect, he may have not known Russian and assumed I was and avoided talking all together, it happens, though kind of rarely) and will not open his mouth.  I hand him the money and he starts flashing five fingers at me.  The conductor is normally lacking in 5 tenge coins because they give them back to 90% of the passengers in change.  I shake my head and tell him I don't have any change.  Well he looks at me like I spoke in Martian and simply walked away.  WITHOUT GIVING ME MY CHANGE!!!!!!!!!!! Argh! I was SO angry.  Who does that?  Never before have I had that happen and I was a bit indignant.  I mean, yes, it was only 5 tenge.  But that someone just walked away from me with my money in his hand. So. Rude.

(This story ended up being MUCH longer than I expected, I think I got a bit worked up.. Haha.)