Travel another way

Travel notes from Joan D., San Jose , California, one of our guests on the Provence tour. After our trip, Eppie and her went to Italy.

“While at the Genova train station we wanted to secure our agenda for the next few days. The next hour involved a lot of yelling, major arm waving, and I think name calling. I would not be surprised to learn that there were some adjectives in there, too. After standing in a line for 30 min I approached the ticket agent who said he spoke ” a little” english. I presented our plans for traveling to Santa Margherita, Pisa, and Verona. The man was gruff and not friendly at all, and when I told him we have eurail passes he went NUTS. Absolutely ballistic. Yelling. A whole upper body workout including waving and pointing. He pushed himself away from his desk, turned to his co-workers and kept talking, turning towards me and pointing and gesturing. Very theatrical and humiliating, but quite non-productive because I had no idea what he wanted. Keep in mind he could speak english. He could, in theory, ask or tell me what the problem was. But he continued to berate me in Italian and I could feel my face burning with embarrasment. When I asked him what was wrong he started up all over again and flipped his ‘open’ (english once again) sign to ‘closed’. I asked again what I had done wrong. He waved his sign in my face and said ‘go to information you don’t know’.

So I did. Turns out that there is a 4€ difference in price from a general ticket and one bought with a eurail pass on 2 of the trips. 2 trips, 2 passengers = 16€. So he would have had to void and reissue the tickets, and I guess that just wasn’t something he wanted to do. The lady in information wrote down everything I wanted, train #s, times, prices, etc and told me to take those slips back to the ticket window, give them to the agent and pay for our tkts. So we get back in line. Finally, the ticket agent (different) took the slips, examined them, confirmed the days again and # of tickets (in english). Then she asked me if I had “anything else”. I said” no, just those trips please”. She burst into a tirade. “Hey, you, don’t you have eurail pass? You no tell him (waving in her now absent co-workers direction). You no tell me you have Eurail pass! Crazy, stupid, you no tell”. Call me crazy, but then why don’t they just ask (or put up a sign) requesting us to present the pass. I think the railway employees in Italy set a new standard in workplace rage. “Going Postal” in the U.S. Is going to have to relinquish its championship belt to the Italians.

So after all this trauma, we catch our tain to Santa Margherita and then take a shuttle bus to Portofino. It was close to 4pm by the time we got there. It was perfect. Quiet, beautiful, picturesque, just as I imagined. We had a very nice, quiet little dinner right by the little sailboats bobbing in the harbor listening to music and playing ‘name that recording artist’ with the manager. I earned a ‘bravo’ by recognizing Sarah Brightman within 15 seconds. All in all, it was a very nice  day in Italy but it took a glass of wine for me to recover from all of the aforementioned American bashing. Ciao!” Joan