Just last weekend, I traveled to Los Angeles to visit my boyfriend. Of course, we didn't have a car to drive ourselves around during our sunny adventures in the golden state. Who came to our rescue? Good ole Uber. And like any other young person that has left the comfort of their small town, I have used Uber previously to this trip; however, I've never used Uber to the extent that I had in California (we took probably about two to three Ubers per day.)
The first thing I discovered was that there is such a thing as Uber Pool, an option where you can car pool with someone else if there's room in the Uber and thus your price will decrease from the original amount. Nifty, huh? Well, being the broke people we are, we opted for this choice every time we Uber'd.
Have you ever engaged in a real conversation with an Uber driver, or fellow passenger? If not, I urge you to give it a try and spread those social butterfly wings. The results are pretty awesome.
If we hadn't taken Uber, we wouldn't have met an executive chef, a leukemia survivor or an African who came to the U.S. with his cousin and fell in love with our country. Not only would we have not heard these amazing stories, but we learned more about LA than we would have just driving around as tourists.
Not only this, but we very quickly found out that people who live in LA talk to their Uber drivers as friends. Our pool partners would get into the car, and immediately greet the driver as if they were best buds and carry on conversations about their careers, their families and friends, basically their entire life stories with the warmest sincerity. To me, this was incredibly refreshing; the natural connections between people we experienced riding in Ubers reminded me how society really should be. It doesn't matter where you're from, or what you know, or what you've done. It's amazing to connect with people and hear their stories, their opinions, their beliefs, even in just a 15-minute car ride.
My boyfriend and I began to discover that you can find connections even from a stranger that's from the other side of the country, even the world. We learned things from them, and in return taught them a thing or two they hadn't have known. The majority of the drivers we had gushed about how much they truly loved talking to their passengers and sharing their stories.
Uber may just be a cheap, convenient way of transportation at a glance, but if you look deeper, Uber is a space where you can be reminded of how cool humans really are and how, just maybe, we don't suck as bad as we sometimes believe.
