A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

CULTURE SHOCK: After a week and a couple of days living in the Bay Area (by the way, should that be capitalized? Or is it just the bay area, or even the Bay area?), of all the things to which I need to accustom myself -- the abundance of fine food in restaurants, the serious and pervasive inferiority of grocery stores to those in LA, the politeness of the drivers, the Asian people in the Fruitvale stores speaking with inner-city Oakland accents, the inability to tell whether this is a pedestrian-scofflaw region (like NY or Chicago) or a pedestrian-law-abiding region (like LA and San Francisco), and the giant robots superintending both the Financial District and the Oakland Harbor -- the weirdest one for me is BART. Specifically: on BART, where each train car has seats facing each direction, why do the people standing (because there are no seats available) orient themselves in conformance with the seats next to them instead of in the direction the train is traveling? I always face the way the train is traveling -- that way I don't get queasy. I don't get the idea of riding backward just because the stranger in the seat next to you with an iPod and a copy of A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is also facing the wrong way.