Alpina's blog post - Many People go to Zuerich

Pushing my pram with little Alpinita in it (if she concedes to be tired - because she wants to explore her world walking nowadays)I often come along a little river in central Zuerich called Sihl, not far from the railway station and the tourist hotspots. It is where you can find one prostitute after another at night and half the male population of the country cruising up and down in their cars. There are so many girls that the market has almost collapsed, so they are all after a quick discount fuck.

The girls are almost all from Hungary - young, good-looking and even well-educated - but strapped for cash. They see it as maybe the only way to improve a desolate financial situation, theirs and that of their families. Why not go to Europe's economic paradise, they may have thought, and pick up the money in the streets where is must be lying about in heaps?

What you could read in the newspaper and which is hard to believe in this miniature country of the free: they are virtually held as slaves, threatened, beaten and exploited in a terrible way, as one could read in the aftermath of a court case against their slave masters - foreign and national businessmen.

What is interesting: when you come to Zuerich from another country, there is almost no chance for you to obtain a work permit. It you come and say you want to be a prostitute, you will easily get a permit in exchange for a few Swiss francs. But only for a month - who on earth wants, is the logic of the authorities, fuck the same hooker twice?

When I walk back after six along this way, many of them are already standing there grotesquely half naked - they have to begin early as they can only charge discount prices and must hand in a fixed sum the next morning. Sometimes I said hello to some of them, but there was never a reply. I can understand this well: although I am a woman, they see me as part of a system that makes possible what happens to them.