Riding Up Front (RUF)

“I’m from the plains. The plains of Nepal.”

I go to San Francisco very often since my company is headquartered in the Bay Area. I noticed that in my last five Uber/Lyft trips, three of my drivers came from Nepal. I was tired after a marathon day of meetings–Janak was a young and chipper Nepalese Uber driver, who claimed that there were at least 50,000 Nepalese people in the Bay Area.

“50,000?”

“Yes. Nepal isn’t a really great place right now”

“Did you live in the mountains in Nepal?”

He laughed. “No. We have everything in Nepal. I am from the plains. The plains of Nepal. Then I moved to Alabama. Then here.”

“Why Alabama?” I was mystified. I don’t know very much about Alabama after having lived in the US for twenty years. So it seemed like a strange pick as a first destination in the US for someone coming all the way from Nepal.

“I like Alabama,” Janak said, smiling almost shyly. “Big Party. Big.”

“Hmm.” I wondered what Nepalese people did to party.

“You need to party,” he told me. As everyone knows I probably look like I haven’t gone to a club in 20 years. Probably true.  “Here. Listen to this. But let me know if it bothers you.”

All of a sudden, our car was a moving house-music party bus.

He started singing along to the mono-syllabic lyrics; it didn’t really bother me.