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06/05/2003: when life (or in this case a garbage truck) is stranger than fiction
So I walked to the first class I had today, from the underground station towards the physics department, and as I passed by the jail (the grounds of the physics department here are directly next to a detention jail, with the watchtowers and barbed wires a couple of meters away from the nearest physics building, and you can sometimes watch the prisoners in the yard from some lecture halls and rooms when you're bored) there stood a garbage truck collecting the trash that's to be recycled, nothing unusual so far. But this garbage truck was decorated with well over a dozen stuffed animals and other plush soft toys, which from the looks of it had been on the outside of that truck for quite some time. It had some fastened to its sides, some to the front radiator grill, and some on the roof of the driver's cabin. I also had a vanity plate with a confederate flag below the regular license plate (btw, are such plates still called vanity plates if they don't serve to identify the vehicle?). My first thought was "aren't there regulations for public service trucks?" until I remembered that the recycling part of the trash collection is, I think, done by privatized subsidiaries. It's been the first time I've seen a garbage truck decorated in any way at all (well except for advertisements on the sides and such), and really, soft toys and a confederate flag (there were some more minor decorations, but I didn't stop to examine it further), that combination is already bizarre in itself, and all on a garbage truck?!
