party bus
ok now let's do a silly one
a few months ago i was chatting w a mother/daughter pair of tourists (both expensively turned-out & extremely beautiful, the luminescent daughter maybe 20ish, the mother in her 40s & glowing as if w decades of good habits) when the mother asked me if locals ever took the party buses. i was like, “oh totally, my friend’s family rented one for an event, it took us to all the speakeasy-style bars, it was great.” but it turned out that didn’t answer the question she was asking. she & her daughter had the night before been urged by the riders of one such party bus to join their group, and she was asking me if that was how it worked, if you just hopped on & hopped off random party buses. & i had to tell her, “no, don’t do that.” do not board closed, moving vehicles, being driven god knows where, to join a group of drunken strangers. i was so surprised by the interaction that (obviously) i’m still thinking about it. how does a beautiful & apparently wealthy woman, somebody w a lot to lose, reach the age she did & still have to ask that question?
Maybe they were from a high-trust society. I've been in places where I accidentally left my wallet out for hours, and when I came back, it was still there
This is one of those anecdotes where I'm so curious about the person's exact phrasing and tone. If I were invited to join a party bus, I would decline the offer like a person with a reasonable self-preservation instinct, and then obsessively mull over whether that's a thing that other people do, because if it weren't a thing that other people do, why did they invite me to do it?
The difference is that if I asked someone about it, I'd be like, "that's not a thing, right?" rather than "is this a typical cultural practice that the hip locals do?"