My husband and I were in Cinque Terre this past weekend and witnessed a heated interaction between a ticket inspector and a group of 5 early twenties American men.
We boarded the train in Vernazza and immediately after the door closes, a ticket inspector goes up to the group of guys and asks to see their tickets. They pretend like they don’t know what she’s asking for and then after stalling for a few seconds, one guy nudges at his friend and says “don’t you have the tickets on your phone?”. The friend says yes and makes an excuse saying oh there’s no service so the ticket won’t load. The inspector says that shouldn’t matter but will wait until we get out of the tunnel. We get out of the tunnel and the dude pulls up a ticket and surprise surprise, it’s a ticket going from a different village. He’s sweating and red faced at this point and tries to say he thought the tickets were round trip. She tells him to cut the bullshit and that it’ll be a €50 euro fee per person.
The guys don’t want to pay up and keep trying to say they bought tickets. Inspector repeats cash or card. They stand there all looking at each other and she repeats it yet again, this time a little more aggressively. Main dude screams at her to stop yelling at him and says he can’t understand what she’s saying and that she needs to speak better English. He’s flustered at this point and starts mocking her. Inspector is heated and getting more and more impatient and says pay up or she will call the police. One of the other guys says let’s just pay. Train stops before they pay and they all try to get off. The inspector blocks them. Main dude gets even more pissed and tells inspector “I want to see your fucking ID” “how do we even know that you work here” when she’s clearly wearing the uniform and has a name tag. She says okay not a problem and he continues yelling at her saying he’s going to report her blah blah blah. She says she just trying to do her job. One of them finally takes out their card and pays and they get off at the next stop.
Moral of the story, just buy the ticket and if you’re too cheap/willing to take the risk, then at least own up to it if you get caught. Public transportation abroad is so cheap so it’s not worth getting fined €50-100 over a €5 ticket. I was literally so embarrassed to be American after seeing this interaction go down.
Submitted May 09, 2023 at 06:52PM by marrymeodell https://ift.tt/gy6E34U
Comments
Post a Comment