how to tell you're back in the real world

I'm heading out to Mamyr school at the far edge of town, to teach my Tuesday night class. The number 75 bus approaches my stop on Timiryazeva and Rosybakieva and, with stomach-twisting groans of protest, lurches to a standstill. It's packed.

An 18- or 20-seated vehicle, barely more than a minibus, I'm guessing there are slightly over fifty people crammed inside. But I must board this bus – I've only been to Mamyr once before, and I'm not sure whether my journey time on that occasion was typical, so I need to allow for variation. Plus, I've been told that these 75s are sporadic; I've no idea when the next one will arrive, and if you ask anyone about bus timetables in Almaty, the standard response is incredulous laughter.

Half a dozen people are shot out of the bus like champagne corks with legs, and about a dozen more rush from the bus stop towards the doors. As the slow-moving and tentative foreigner, I'm naturally the last one to board. I manage to get about half of myself onto the bottom step before the doors abruptly slam closed.

"Bugger!", says my inner worst-case-scenario voice. "Well, time to get used to life as a cripple, I guess."

I unclench slightly as the doors hit my shoulders and rebound harmlessly. Luckily for me, they're impact-sensitive like the ones in lifts. But the driver won't be discouraged – he tries a further three times to dislocate my shoulders before I somehow manage to sardine my way further up the stairs, and the doors close behind me. By this time we're surging forward, swerving into the centre lane where SUVs are waiting with their louder-than-the-apocalypse horns to tell us that we're not welcome on their part of the road (which is basically all of it).

On the step above mine is, without a word of exaggeration, one of the most beautiful women I've ever seen in my life. She's tall and willowy, with perfect almond eyes and sculpted cheekbones, her hair curled slightly at the bottom into a long bob and dyed a ferrous brown. We exchange the first of several glances that say "This is just frikkin' insane, isn't it? Oh well ... what can you do?" She's a step up from me, though, so we're not communicating eye-to-eye in the usual sense. In this Commuters' Olympiad, I'm the equestrian competitor and Cheekbone Woman is on the basketball team.

A minute later, the number 75 stops again. As the doors spring violently open, a middle-aged, egg-shaped Russian woman thrusts a determined foot onto the bottom step. She's got the babushka headscarf and two of those prominent moles on her nose that usually come packaged with an "I've outlived Kruschev, Brezhnev and perestroika, so don't even think about trying to stop me!" attitude.

The head-scarfed babushka grabs hold of a railing, barks something vamos!-like and heaves her bulk onto the now-moving vehicle, pressing me forward towards the Kazakh Goddess. At this point, I'm almost leaning on her arm. My stunning fellow commuter then does an unexpected thing: she sends me another look and leans closer, in a specific kind of way that only your partner would ever do in a Western country.

I'm somewhat taken aback by this.

She's wearing an off-white, coarsely-stitched woollen coat, and the fibres are tickling my right ear as we bounce along the uneven roads. She smells amazing against the backdrop of sweat and gasoline fumes.

Next she changes her handhold, bringing her right hand across my field of view and her shoulder even closer to my ear. The veins in her wrist pop out slightly as she clutches the railing directly in front of me. For a second I forget my surrounds, and it's just me and the exquisitely fine-boned hand of a stranger. Then an SUV does a wild dash across an intersection in front of us, the driver slams on the brakes and I'm jolted back to reality, feeling rather foolish.

Almost 12 months in Russia gave me a crash course in dealing with different perceptions of 'personal space' across cultures. A peak-hour ride on the Moscow Metro could involve levels of proximity and physical contact normally reserved for hairdressers, lovers and proctologists. So I know that whatever's going through the mind of the Kazakh Goddess, she probably isn't trying to send me the signals that Western synapses might be tempted to perceive in this situation.

Still, in the mad intensity of our journey to Mamyr, I'm having to fight really hard against the urge to rest my head on her arm and close my eyes, just to squeeze a bit of comfort from the chaos. It's the most bizarre impulse. I swear I'm not one of those creepy folk who enjoy a bit of frottage on public transport (though I do like using the word in conversation – it's just a fun word, don't you think?), so I honestly don't know what's come over me today. Weird.

Next stop: more champagne corks are released from the bottle, and a new crop of commuters join us. A kind-faced Kazakh woman offers to nurse my bag in her lap, and I accept. Some of the new passengers squeeze between me and the Goddess; she gets pinned against the front windscreen, while I'm crowd-surfed about half-way back toward the centre door.

A group of young Kazakh men are stealing glances at me, no doubt wondering what the Hell a foreigner is doing on the 75. And somehow, though I've been tragically separated from the Goddess, the vamos!-barking headscarf woman has remained steadfastly by my side. She looks up and starts chatting to me, making wise cracks about our situation and punctuating her every comment with a wonderfully full-throated laugh. I'm comprehending about 10% of her jokes at best, but I can't bring myself to spoil the mood with an "Izvinitye, nye panimayu" ("I'm sorry, I don't understand"). So I laugh and nod in appreciation of whatever it is she's saying, throwing in the occasional "Da" to indicate my agreement.

Fifteen minutes later, the 75 is approaching Mamyr school. Two stops before mine, the Goddess peels herself from the windscreen, forces her way to the door and alights. I watch her go, thinking that if I was a typically assertive and persistent Kazakh guy, I'd probably get off and ask her for a number (which I'm told is an entirely acceptable thing to do in this town). But of course, I'm the sadly repressed product of a failed English experiment in penal re-settlement, so I stay on the bus.

Then a rather disturbing thing happens: with the school almost in view directly ahead of us, we suddenly swerve left into the turning lane.

What? Where the Hell are we going?

Apparently there's a system here whereby the conductor somehow finds out where his passengers are headed and, if it's appropriate, orders the driver to make suitable detours. So we turn at the intersection before Mamyr and start climbing towards the mountains.

The road we're on is still in the final stages of being built, and as yet no-one has thought to install any bus stops. We travel for about a kilometre before finally stopping, and I'm now on the far side of an enormous construction zone with peak-hour traffic surging through it. To reach Mamyr, I'll need to cut through unfamiliar back streets and then walk along a half-constructed arterial road with no lanes, no footpaths and lots of lovely, smelly ditches to make the walk more interesting.

I pick my way across no-man's-land and eventually meet the road. Then it's a question of weaving along the shoulder, occasionally veering off to avoid a ditch or squeezing between thoughtlessly-parked cars and oncoming traffic. I arrive at school about 15 minutes later, flustered, dishevelled and with a lot less prep time than I'd hoped for.

"Zdrastvuiyte, Entoni. Kak dela?" ("Hello, Anthony, how are you?) comes the question as I reach the staff room. To answer that question honestly, with suitable explanatory notes, would take far more effort than I'm willing to put in at this point. So:

"Spasiba, Kharasho". ("Fine, thanks.")

Welcome back to the Real World, Mr. Nerd. We missed you ...