November 1991

The first months at the new school... Finding out what places to go and how to get there, which busses to take and at what time they leave and arrive... Being annoyed because you don't have a bike yet so that you can arrange your own schedule and not having to be dependant on public transport...
The bus brought me and some of the other new people to a busstop some 500 meters from our schoolbuilding. It was 08.20 am and it was quite crowded on the road. We had to cross streets twice before we would be walking on the right road. There was a big parking-lot of a truck-company on which we always walked the last couple of hundred meters to school. The first cross was a single road, then a bigger crossing, with first a one-laned street going direction out of town, then a midsection followed by a three-laned street of which one turned left and two went straight into town.
There were on both crossings traffic lights for pedestrians, which we always structurally ignored. Also this time. We crossed the street towards the midsection and were looking at a small car and a truck on the first two lanes, the sight to the third lane was blocked by the truck. We didn't pay attention to the traffic lights of the cars, but they were all on red still, so we started quickly crossing the three-lane section. When we passed the truck we noticed that there was a police van waiting on the third line.
Saints as we are we wouldn't have walked the red light had we seen the police van, but we didn't so what else could we do than just walk on like nothing would be wrong? To us nothing really was wrong.
Unfortunately those cops in the van didn't think quite the same, because as soon as their light turned green, they turned onto the parking lot where we were walking and they stopped us all.
I think there were some 15 all together and the cops wrote for all 15 of us a ticket for walking through the red light.