Today is the local large trash pickup day which means that a lot of our neighbors piled up all sorts of furniture, beds, bits of building materials and anything else they no longer wanted on the streets last night so everything could be picked up this morning. Since we have enough junk around to just order trash containers, we weren’t taking advantage of this special trash collection day…but yesterday when we went to walk the dog in the evening, we couldn’t help but take a look at all the stuff piled up along the way.
Most of the stuff seemed to be junk and must have been waiting to be thrown away for a while. There were a few items which seemed like they could be useful to someone else if they happened to stop and pick them up and even a couch we found kind of interesting which we talked about carrying down the street to our house. But before we got too much further down the street, we started noticing white vans everywhere we looked. Most of them were from Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and other areas like this – which really made us wonder what they were doing there. The treasures on the side of the road couldn’t be that great, could they? These people were like little crabs or something, just trolling down the streets, stopping at each pile and jumping out to see if anything might be hiding behind a chair or in a shelf.
It’s not that I’ve never seen people out and about during major trash collection days – I’ve even been out looking for stuff at times. It was just weird that they all seemed to appear at once and some streets had 6 or 7 vans patrolling the area. There must have been at least 15-20 vans cruising around that we personally saw on our side of town.
We noticed a few things that people loaded up and honestly wondered just what it was they were going to do with the little scraps of wood they collected. Mattresses, pieces of furniture and other things one can understand how they might be useful – but these people were picky and seemed to know just what they wanted.
In the future, we will definitely be careful to not set anything outside that might look as if it’s meant to be part of this collection. In fact, Stefan checked a few of the old farming pieces in front of our house being used as decor to make sure they were anchored down. He was also quite happy his motorcycle didn’t happen to be standing out. These people were on the prowl for good stuff and we didn’t want to encourage any misunderstandings!
Photos! Please, please photos!
Unfortunately everything is already gone. Our villagers put everything out yesterday and the garbage trucks came around at about 9am and hauled everything off. Rather efficient but that makes it hard on those who think they can just go back later and pick something up….
I just had a converstation with my boyfriend about this ‘tradition’ in some countries! How funny to then come across your post.The white van thing is odd. It would be interesting to find out what actually happens with the stuff they take. Sell it? Use it?
I wonder myself what they do with the stuff. But I do think some of them plan to see it. When I was driving through a neighboring town earlier this week which was also having a trash pickup like this, I saw people with a van and their trailer which was advertising a furniture company parked on the side of the road. They seemed to be inspecting everything they’d collected and were packing things up. Looked like they had a pretty good haul. I guess they might refinish some of it and see if they can sell it.
Ah, Sperrmüll – love it ;). I just wrote about it myself and was really wondering who might have taken our (well not our, the ppo’s) freezer!?!
Up here it’s actually mostly people from Poland or Belarus driving around and collecting things – I’m sure they sell it.
It really freaked me out when I moved to see people rifling through my trash, they did put it all back together neatly though.. I was kinda like.. Ummm.. you really want that crap!