I spend a pretty sizable chunk of my day riding the bus. I live the farthest away of all of the teachers from the American Home. Fortunately, Vladimir is a small enough city that everyone is pretty close to everything, but my commute is still about 40 minutes each way; that's about 10 minutes of walking and a half hour of bus riding. Also, the buses in Vladimir run very frequently. I rarely have to wait more than a few minutes for a bus, and because I live basically at the end of the line for a lot of the bus routes, I can take almost any bus to get to and from the American Home.  

As a former CABS bus driver and fully licensed commercial driver (not that that means anything here), I notice a lot during my daily bus commute. For starters, there are two bus companies in Vladimir: BigAvtoTrans and the city bus company. BigAvtoTrans runs most of the buses and serves the biggest area. One ride costs 14 rubles (about 45 cents). These are diesel buses, mainly from Germany, which means that all the instructions and emergency procedures inside are written in German—pretty useless for me and the average Russian. The bus drivers are like Russian drivers in general: insane. They do things (like cutting off other buses, using the turn-only lane to go straight and pass slower traffic, and generally drive really fast) that even the most hard-pressed and careless college bus driver wouldn’t attempt. So they immediately had my respect and admiration.

The city bus company runs the trolleybuses, which are electric buses that use overhead wires. My first time in Russia, I thought electric buses would be smooth and quiet, but that is the opposite of the truth. Trolleybuses are the slowest and most uncomfortable way to get around—if they go too fast or take a corner too wide, they fall off the wires. So trolleybuses crawl around the city, jerking in and out of drive mode. The buses themselves are often ancient; a lady who lived here 20 years ago said the trolleybuses are the exact same ones from back then. Because of all these disadvantages, a ride on the trolleybus costs 12 rubles (38 cents). 

In both companies, you pay a conductor on the bus, who gives you a little ticket and a nasty look for using your worthless kopecks to pay your bus fare. 

It’s kind of hard to believe that 4 months ago I was in college and driving a bus. Time flies and situations change (fortunately I love this situation). But I can always be an East Residential bus driver at heart, screaming into stops and pushing my somewhat-trusty steed of a bus to its limits to make up a little time before the 5:30 class change.