Video Diary: Cool Kids on BART

A really small thing made my trip on the Pittsburgh-Baypoint train on Saturday memorable. I got on the train at Civic Center station and saw two guys in their 40s sitting together eating their lunch. An old lady with a cane got on the train, and one of the guys got up to give her his seat, but she didn’t want to sit next to his friend, which made me sad.

I looked away for a little while, then I noticed that everyone was looking over in my direction. I turned around and saw that three young teenagers had got on the train, and they were playing with yoyo-like toys that I hadn’t seen before. It was a ball on a string with a handle, and they were balancing the ball on the handle to showing off their skills on the moving train. The two guys who were eating their lunch were amused and asked the kids to show them how to play with it. And everyone in that corner of the train was smiling.

As the guys left, they gave the kids a fist pump and said good bye. I asked Willem, one of the kids, what the toy was. He told me that it’s a Japanese toy called kendama. You can see Willem showing off his best move on BART in the video I took above.

Thanks, Willem and friends, who brought a smile to our BART ride on Saturday.