There was a little dark joke going around last winter about a woman from Berlin who got so depressed, she decided to take her own life by jumping in front of a train. She stood on the ramp for two days and froze to death.

I was thinking about this fictional woman as I stood in front of the ticket machine and was astound to learn that the company that runs the Berlin public transportation had raised the ride fare.

There might be a lot of reasons for the price hike, and I am sure that some of them are more than justified, but it strike me as a bit of chutzpa when a company that didn’t deliver its service for such a long time, is daring to ask its customers to pay more.

And I was bit insulted to learn that in such a protest infested city as Berlin, there was not a lot of opposition for this move.