Corruption

You know, you always read that in this and that country the corruption is to high, they are doing something against it, it works or not, they have to improve the situation to join EU or whatever... all pretty abstract when it's all far away.

So, two weeks ago was the first time that i got into contact with actual corruption. Nothing big, but still. And if you've read my last blog entry you might have a guess which country i am talking about. BUT it's not like that: the Serbians were perfectly ok, i mean, i've seen nothing like that there. And that's including the Serbian border controls. Perfectly fine, just checking my passport and asking if i had anything to declare.
Where i have seen corruption was well inside Schengen. To be more precise, it was at the Schengen border where the Hungarian border police let us know that they are corrupt. I was travelling by bus, inside a Serbian bus. After passing the Serbian border control we moved on to enter the Schengen area, still in a queue with other buses. There was an announcement in Serbian. I expected that it would say we should get ready to get our luggage inspected by Schengen border control - i had heard from a friend that they check every piece of luggage for smuggled cigarettes. I asked the lady sitting next to me and she explained to me that the border police had informed us that they want one euro per person to let us through faster. Otherwise they would "do it by the textbook" which meant checking everyone's luggage. That might take several hours more. We had one guy on the bus who was rather keen on collecting the one euro from everyone. When they came to check our passports his was one of two passports that they took with them to inspect it further, so he his passport was neither Serbian nor EU. Anyways, most of the people on the bus paid. And nobody checked any of our luggage. Could've had anything in my backpack, everything passed.

50+ euros per bus, i-don't-know-how-many buses per day; you do the math.

Corruption. Disgusting. How normal it was for everyone, and all people were pretty happy about "one euro for two hours of my life". Well, i don't have any solutions to offer here, who am i to judge especially all those commuters going there everyday.
But it's definitely not allright this way.