Heaneyland!

You can ride! You can ride! You can ride!

As we were carrying our bags to the boarding location for the Fung Wah bus from Boston to Chinatown, two girls were handing out flyers. Given the dashed-off-on-a-word-processor-and-taken-to-Kinko's design, we weren't expecting these flyers to be an attempt on the part of Peter Pan and Greyhound to persuade riders of the Fung Wah bus to switch back to their bus lines...but, as the people among you who regularly chew on lead paint chips will not have guessed, that was exactly what they were.

The major appeal of the Fung Wah bus is that it is incredibly cheap: the price has meandered around the $15-$20 range in the past, but at the moment, it costs a mere $10 for a one-way trip to Boston. $10! Think about that. That's less than a taxi from midtown Manhattan to my house in Brooklyn. Dude.

Anyway, when it comes to choosing your bus line, Greyhound would like you to consider the fact that "IT'S MORE THAN JUST MONEY!!!!!" Like, Greyhound has "boarding and deboarding in a heated terminal". Yeah, the fact that I get to spend time in the skeevy Port Authority Bus Terminal is a real selling point. I mean...Rose and I like to go to Chinatown. The fact that we have to go to Chinatown to catch the bus is a selling point, not a drawback.

Another thing Greyhound cites as a feature of their bus service is "video equipped buses". I'm sorry, that's not a feature, that's a bug. I don't want to be on a bus that's showing a movie. It's never a movie I want to see, and the volume is just loud enough to be distracting, but quiet enough that if I decide I'm just going to give up on trying to read and watch the stupid movie, it's hard to hear. (We did actually have to deal with a movie on the Fung Wah bus today, but that was because the guy sitting in front of us was watching a movie on a portable DVD player with no headphones. It was a really amazing display of rudeness.)

I have mixed feelings about the Fung Wah bus getting more publicity nowadays. A year and a half ago, it seemed like the only people who knew about it besides Chinatown residents were young, hip, well-behaved people. Now we're starting to get some of the usual bad bus passengers (Mr. Talky Cell Phone Guy, the Drunk Frat Boys, the aforementioned DVD Watching Man). Ah, well. At the moment, even if Fung Wah cost the same as Greyhound (which it certainly doesn't; Greyhound is offering a deal where you can pay $20 for a one way ticket if you buy it three days in advance, but I can pay half that in Chinatown and just show up 10 minutes before the bus leaves), I'd rather ride Fung Wah. Hopefully it'll stay that way.

Posted by Francis at 04:52 AM