I found Jésus in the Madrid Airport at 02:00, following the New Year’s festivities in Puerto del Sol. Jésus was struggling to stay awake, fearful that his bags would be stolen through the night. An Argentinian by birth, Jésus was on his way back from Rome, where he spent Christmas near the Vatican. He booked tickets months ago for his trip to Rome, and because he put a higher premium on his wallet than his time, he found himself celebrating New Year’s in a Madrid airport terminal.
A friend and colleague tells me he once met a drug mule. This man used seven lubricated plastic tubes to transport cocaine from northern Africa to France. A quick Google search reveals even more remarkable stories, including this on a 12-year-old boy who turned himself in to authorities, after having swallowed 87 packets of heroin. The Nigerian-born pre-teen flew from Europe to New York and fell ill upon arrival.
Tired of walking to work through snow? Check out the pedway map at ChicagoWalks.org for the best indoor detours in the Loop south of the Chicago river.
Printed in Scanlon’s Monthly in June 1970, this piece by Hunter S. Thompson gave rise to gonzo journalism. ['Greetings, Stranger' is a hybrid of oral history and gonzo journalism. - ed]
Looking for a taxi? Google Labs has launched the Ridefinder just for you.
All evidence indicates that small acts of kindness occur in cities at the same rate as in rural areas. The world-famous Stanley Milgram–the very same who started the six-degrees experiment–conducted a groundbreaking study in the 70s where he asked increasingly onerous favors of city-slickers and country folk, and the resultant data suggested no correlation between location and willingness to comply with requests for favors of time from unfamiliar strangers.For example, take Toronto, a city with over 2.5 million inhabitants. Here’s the text from a hand-written sign posted on a telephone pole:To Larissa, Gus (?), Nurse with Ice Cream Cone, Man with Cellphone, Woman from La Hacienda with Wet Towels, THANK YOU!! For your most generous care and kindness when I fell off my bike on Tuesday, August 14th. I am fine and my stitches are healing. YOU GIVE ME FAITH IN HUMANITY.
The Adler Planetarium rocks. If you’re looking for a terrific place to meet new people, try visiting the Adler Planetarium on a starry night. There’s a good chance you’ll find fellow stargazers, particularly for major astronomical events (e.g. lunar eclipse, solar eclipse, meteor showers and the transit of Venus). Adler Planetarium always hosts a small event whenever an astronomical event takes place. Expect at least a dozen telescopes and a bevy of amateur astronomers.
Welcome!
This weekly blog, titled “Greeting, Stranger”, will document and distribute the stories of strangers we meet on public transit and in public spaces. In the last week, have you spoken with a friendly or thought-provoking stranger on a bus, train, subway or airplane? Did they share a fascinating story?
Check back every Sunday night for new stories. The tales you read will be as fair and balanced as the writers and editors can make them. Just keep in mind that the impressions we form of the friendly strangers we meet are subjective by nature. Quotations are not exact, but they are in spirit.
If you feel inspired to learn more about the stranger sitting next to you on the subway, please, by all means, feel free to register as a contributor and tell us about your experience. The more off-the-wall and spontaneous your story is, the better. We’re particularly interested in stories that cross the racial, political and socioeconomic divide — stories that, in their retelling, foster an enhanced sense of humanity, purpose, and unity.
The famed psychologist Stanley Milgram wrote an essay in 1972 on the phenomenon of the ‘familiar stranger’–someone whom you never speak with but whom you see frequently enough to recognize. The Familiar Stranger Project is a joint research effort by UC Berkeley and IBM to develop emergent technologies that link familiar strangers with one another. There’s an excellent paper online that describes their work.
At roughly 1:05 AM (an hour ago) in the Grand station of Chicago’s Redline Train, I witnessed an entirely unprovoked assault and battery: an African-American man in his late-30s/early-40s dressed head to toe in black assaulted an older Latino man with graying hair.
I’ve never before witnessed a crime so violent.
The assailant (the African-American) speaks some form of Spanish and bad vernacular English. He was drunk. Prior to the attack, he was showing off his prison tattoos to the five of us who were waiting in the Grand station for the southbound train.
He was struggling to keep his balance–at one point, he took two steps backward and as he neared the edge, three of us waiting in line warned him to step away from the tracks so as not to fall over.
He rocked and swayed, cursing in Spanish and English at us, browbeating everyone within sight, with the exception of the two men pictured in the photograph below. [Coming soon]. Although I may have been initlally in his line of fire, he rapidly switched from cursing me in Spanish to telling me that he liked my glasses. He offered me a cockeyed grin, then stepped forward to pound my fist. Of course, I reluctantly cooperated, returning his gesture with a half-smile. I reasoned that the gesture alone would create enough rapport for him to leave me alone. If, at the time, I had known what kind of violence he was capable of, I would have instead politely declined.
I was carrying a wallet, a nice phone and an Olympus digital camera on me at the time. Had I taken the camera or the phone out prior to or during the assault, I would have no doubt been attacked myself.
I will finish writing this tomorrow evening. I’ve filed two police reports. I’m finishing the second as I write this.