Kultur 4

Schwarzfahren...talk about a scary experience.  I have a fun experience with it that I will now share.  Over the summer in Koblenz, I had no student ID for my first week there.  I was supposed to be getting this soon, but it took too long and it got to the point where I was going broke and didn't have the 7 EUR that I needed daily to get to and from work.  Thus...schwarzfahren it was.  I had not seen anyone checking passes so I thought I could probably get away with it.  It was a pretty scary couple of times...and it went on for probably 4 or 5 days.  

Finally, the student ID was mine!  And the next morning...BOOM!  Someone starts checking tickets.  It was the biggest sigh of relief ever, seeing as I didn't have 40 EUR in my bank account to pay the fine that would've ensued.  However, I now had my ID and all was good.  After talking to friends about this, they did tell me that kids tend to do this when riding trains to school.  Instead of buying a ticket to go to school, they would just get on and get off before a main stop and they would use the money to buy sweets or food.

Also...the other thing I noticed was the crossing the red light thing.  Every time I asked why they would wait, they would simply say that it wasn't right because children could see them.  It struck me as odd so I laughed it off.  However, it got to a point where they wouldn't do it even late at night, so it was very funny to read that article and see someone write about it.