p*ss us off, why don't you?

Just when I have been thinking that I can NOT take travelling with the great unwashed anymore and that no matter how environmentally friendly public transport may be, I simply have to get a scooter... forces conspire to show me that it really is worth the effort of travelling shoulder-to-shoulder with everyone and their germs... (NOT! NOT! NOT!)

Picture this: Italy 1956...
oh, sorry, got carried away there...

Picture this: Paris, Good Friday 2008.
The BF and I climb on a bus and the driver uses this opportunity to type an sms message. Just as I am forming the words to tell my partner that I have now seen it all, (drivers using cell phones while driving 60 people is de rigeur, but hey, why not type instead??) I see a coat on a heap on the floor at the exit. Then I identify a shoe sticking out from under the coat and then my unwilling eyes finally register the scene they do not want to see...
a young mother is crouching down, hanging her little girl's exposed bum over the edge of the bus to PEE AT THE BUS STOP, feet in the bus, ass to the world! The doors keep trying to close, but the driver looks up long enough from her smsing to hit the open button a few times. People are climbing off the bus around the 2 year old's buttocks. It is the most grotesque thing I have ever seen and clearly the toddler is too traumatised to wee so publicly, despite the encouraging whisteling sounds her idiotic mother is making. Eventually the mother gives up and pulls her kid's pants up again and we lurch to the next bus stop, where the procedure is repeated. For all we know, this could have been going on for the last 4 stops, but finally - I guess the child just could not handle her mother's rushing water sounds anymore - she pees over the edge, narrowly missing another passanger's shoe. Glory!

Whatever happened to getting off the bus when your child needs to wee?!?!