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20/01/2004: "Rubbish day"

Tomorrow is rubbish day. Here in St. Gallen, rubbish has to be put in specially approved official rubbish bags (the 3 neatly aligned bags cost more than a month's pocket money when I was a kid) and deposited in the street the night before the weekly collection day. If you deposite a bag too early, or too late, or if your bag is too full or torn, it may not be collected. If this should happen, the rubbish police will investigate your bag, open it and try to figure out to whom it belongs to. Then, the police will write to the perpetrator and warn him about rubbish regulations. Should the offence be repeated, the perpetrator will be fined. It's up to law-abiding citizens to figure out how to store the rubbish until it may be lawfully deposited for collection.

(For the curious, is tagging allowed, you may ask? It isn't, but since it appears to be easier to investigate criminal rubbish bags than tags, tags remain while bags go. For those even more curious, this picture was shot in the rare interval of time between lawfully committing the rubbish bags to the street and official collection. It was on this cold, snowy, Tuesday night.)