I have been in Italy for 3 weeks. That's it. Somehow in these past 3 weeks, I have received 3 tickets. As in I had to pay some Italian for "breaking the law" THREE TIMES. That's once per week.
Let's recap: I've only received 1 ticket in my whole life prior to this. ONE. That's almost 21 years ticket-free, folks. What is the cause for this newfound "habit" of mine? I'm going to go ahead and say that Italy is at fault here since I was able to manage 21 years living in the US relatively fine-free. Just sayin'.
Week 1: There were the people checking for bus tickets, now affectionately known by my roommate and I as "The Bus Nazis." We were on our way from our temporary housing to our permanent housing, luggage and all, when The Bus Nazis got on and started demanding to see everyone's tickets. As many of you know, my roommate and I had been thoroughly taking advantage of the fact that no one seemed to care if we got on the bus without paying 1E. Well, The Bus Nazis care. I tried my best to get the 5ft tall lady Nazi to send me the 40E ticket to a fake address but she would have none of it. I even used the formal when talking to her....but no dice. Proper grammar couldn't save me. She was completely terrifying and unforgiving so my roommate and I each paid her on the spot because the last thing we wanted was to get kicked off the bus with all our luggage. Bye-bye, $53.66 USD. (In reality I don't feel too bad about this one because I had probably gotten away with 20 or so free bus rides at that point. So really I was only paying a 20E fine.)
Week 2: My roommate and I had decided to go to Venice for the day. We'd gone other places on the train and knew how to play the game: you must validate your ticket before you get on the train. Yeah, well, knowing how to play the game isn't enough. You've got to actually participate in the game, and it's when you forget to play that you get burned. We were sitting on the train which was rolling through the glorious Italian countryside when I saw the ticket guy (I'm sure he has a more official title) coming by checking for i biglietti. I looked at my roommate and she looked back at me and we both knew it: we had completely forgotten the "validation" part of the game.
He came by and asked for our tickets which we presented to him, obviously not validated and seemingly worthy of a small fine. He told me that we had to each pay 44E for "breaking the law." Um...that was 5x the price of my ticket...a little extreme.
After playing the dumb American card (a good card to have in your arsenal) and telling him that we were students and didn't have 44E, he got bored and decided that he would be satisfied with charging us only 5E each. Whew. Not bad. This was made better by the fact that I had found 5E in my jacket pocket that morning on the way to the station. It's like the world was trying to tell me something.
Week 3: A couple of friends and I were heading home from a nice day in Parma last Sunday. We were all sitting in a row on the train since we like to stretch out our feet under/on the seats. I had my feet under the seat where I knew they were allowed to be (I had received warnings on previous rides and didn't want a ticket) while 2 of my friends had their feet on the seats. The train guy came by, and my friends quickly took their feet off the seats knowing that it wasn't allowed. Thinking he had gone they put their feet back up when all of a sudden, train guy popped up, pointed at all of us and said that we had broken "an international law" and were being fined 7.66E for having our feet on the seats. WHAT?!
1. That is the most random amount I have ever heard of
2. I shouldn't be getting fined for having my feet under the seat
3. Ridiculous.
So, being the only one in the group that spoke Italian (well...not really, my roommate was trying to pretend she didn't know what he was saying) I tried to get him to just let us off with a warning but to no avail. This dude was ferocious and so I paid the fine just to get him to go away. He was being incredibly rude and what was actually worse than the fact that we had received a ridiculous fine: he gave me my change in all 1 cent coins, aka USELESS in Italy. Even vending machines don't want them. They are like the red headed stepchild of the coin family. To quote my Italian Guru: "Only piss off the people who are mean to you by paying with pennies." Fining us 7.66E for something as stupid as having our feet on the seats is one thing, but giving me back my change in all pennies was just salt on the wound.
There you have it. This is now my 4th week in Italia, and so far I've lasted 2 days without being ticketed for something absurd. Don't worry, there are 5 days to go so I have plenty of time to keep my one-fine-a-week record going. Stay tuned.
No comments:
Post a Comment