I’ve been in the States for two weeks. Day after tomorrow, I’ll return to Bangkok. I spent time with friends and family in Seattle and the Midwest before arriving in Atlanta to attend a CDC conference.
This city is new to me, so my antennae are up and my first impressions are doing battle with my stereotypes. Nothing so far has made me feel I’m in the South especially, but then again what I don’t know about the South could fill lots of blog entries.
Outside the South, do young black men ask legal advice of white tourists from Thailand as they exit the train together? I have no idea. But there we were, taking the elevated in from the airport. Dude wondered about the limits on free speech.
“Can they lock you up for talking smack on the train?”
He was earnest and polite. Maybe he picked me to ask because, dragging luggage, I might have been neutral, or at least unlikely to cross paths with either party again.
He told me he’d been innocently flirting (“I mean, what do you expect, her just sitting there with her stuff all hanging out?”), when out of nowhere another woman passenger, apparently a friend of the first, turned two’s-company into three’s-a-crowd.
“They’re both talking about how if they snitch to some Jane Wayne, my ass gonna be locked up. Can they do that?”
I wish I could say I helped him out. He wasn’t just making conversation—he really wanted to know. I mumbled something about the Golden Rule. He looked up, saw his bus coming, and apologized for not being able to talk longer.
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