And what do you say, what is that experience like? i mean ride for free, and not smuggle.
The citizens of Belgrade are already enjoying the... that privilege the richest and the poorest. I remember the early and mid-1990s, the dubious romance of the oil embargo: even then we rode for free, because no one bought a ticket, but we still smuggled. At least in theory. In practice, there was almost no control. That's what Milošević honored us with, to make it a little easier for us to swim through the shit he got us into, after we had previously elected him with a convincing majority to get us into the shit.
Because we were told that it should be so, and we believed it. A person believes in all kinds of things when he loses his mind, or he never acquires it.
So we drove for nothing, but the very act of driving was a privilege, since moving buses were a precious rarity on the then half-empty metropolitan streets, unlike the passengers, who were in abundance, so we stood on each other's shoes and breathed for necks.
Nothing is really free
In intercity traffic, it was even worse, since there were hardly any buses (they run on gasoline, jbg), and traveling by train could easily be called the transportation of chaotically thrown human flesh. Once I stood for two or three hours in a miniature toilet, surrounded and pressed by the bodies of several travelers. But that's why the train ticket from BG to NS, due to the suspiciously alchemical effect of hyperinflation, cost, for example, today's four dinars.
Now there is no war and no embargo, but we again caught those who sucked our blood even then, like some ineradicable lice. And then it's somehow logical that there aren't even buses, and that transportation is once again apparently free, to the extent that it exists at all.
With the fact that, of course, nothing is really free, only the method of payment is different - and much worse for all of us. And we haven't even paid off the principal from the nineties, so you see.
