A frosty Minsk-like morning and Blue43 smells like the Popov Distillery. An assortment of grunts and snorks announce the Master Distiller - Across from me, slumped and snoring, a man with a walrus mustache and a very wrinkled brown bag, his appearance distorted by the swirling currents and eddies of the fumes he emits. To my right, a man wearing a plaid skirt. My eyes follow his pleats down... to his hairy legs, to his filthy (aerobics?)sneakers with no laces, their tongues yanked forward as far as theoretically possible. I read a newspaper. He is reading over my shoulder. I generously offer him the Style Section. We talk about Hamilton, the Federalists and the NY Post. Then, during a short layover at the Recently Deceased Mall, he melts down off his seat and crawls toward the front of the bus...

"Do I have time to pick up that wrapper?"

The bus driver has been asked this often. "We got 2 more minutes here, but you got only 30 seconds", he impatiently responds. "...and no crawling on the bus."

The skirted man slithers out the door and I watch him from inside Distillery, darting and scrambling over the ice, determined to gather every piece of litter near the bus within the half minute time constraint.(Cue "Chechen SuperMarketSweep" theme.) Two minutes later... time's up, and he's back on the Vodka Bus with a skirt-load of gum wrappers, frenchfry sleeves and unrecognizable parking lot detritus.

Eighty-proof, Blue43 rolls past the Recently Resurrected Mall. The snorting sleeper, a laid back gentleman if there ever was one, casually crosses his legs. His head has fallen straight back and his nose is aimed skyward, at just the the right angle, so that with each draw of breath the low wet rumble of tubas play. The man with the skirt is now talking to "Al", the grouchy old man with the pumpernickel toast, about pianos and Princeton.

8:49 - Stepped off the bus at West Street - greeted by a blast of the coldest cleanest Siberian air.