The Ticket Checker Magnet Strikes Again

This pecu­liar curse came upon me in 1993 when I was liv­ing in Slo­va­kia with my fam­ily. We never saw any­one use tick­ets on pub­lic tran­sit, so we assumed that nobody both­ered to pay to ride. This was pretty dumb; in real­ity they all had monthly passes that they could bring out when­ever the ticket check­ers came to test the legal­ity of their rid­ing. Well, inevitably, one day I got caught. The fine was 700 crowns (then around 20 bucks) and I only had a 1000 crown note. They had no change and after pulling me off the bus went around to the local kiosks in the dreary com­mu­nist sub­urbs but nobody else had any change, either. Finally they wanted to take me to the police sta­tion where they could get the change, but in des­per­a­tion I told them to keep the change so I could just go home.

After that, in one sin­gle year of liv­ing on the out­skirts of Bratislava, I got checked for my ticket 7 more times (of course, I always had one). I knew peo­ple who’d lived there their whole lives and com­muted in every day and had never been checked once. The sin­gu­lar abil­ity to attract ticket check­ers has fol­lowed me into other cities as well. One time in Stras­bourg I was late pick­ing Zeke up at school, and after run­ning blocks and blocks saw a tram pull in that would take me only one stop for the last stretch. I had no ticket. I con­sid­ered hop­ping aboard any­way… and right then saw a ticket checker step off that very tram. What was to stop him from get­ting on again? I took the warn­ing and ran the rest of the way.

Well, you can see where this all lead­ing. Last night when Andrew and I came in to Pavia we saw the bus we needed to get out to the camp­ground where his par­ents and Zeke were wait­ing for us. We ran for it, jumped on board, and asked the dri­ver how to pay; he oblig­ingly got out a ticket and gave us the change. So, we con­cluded, you can pay the dri­ver in Italy just like in Ger­many. Easy as pie.

This morn­ing we aston­ished our­selves by get­ting up as early as we’d planned and set­ting off at a rea­son­able hour. Roger came with us because our first stop before head­ing out for our first day on the Via Fran­ci­gena was the church of San Pietro Ciel D’Oro, home to St. Augustine’s mor­tal remains. In due time a bus arrived at the stop and we climbed aboard, but the dri­ver shrugged. Pre­sum­ably he told us that he didn’t sell the tick­ets, though our inabil­ity to under­stand Ital­ian meant we missed some cru­cial detail. He didn’t tell us to get off again, so we stayed on, a lit­tle mys­ti­fied. But I knew right then it was just a mat­ter of time.

It was, in fact, about 10 min­utes. We were nearly at our stop when six, count them SIX, ticket check­ers boarded the bus. They asked for our ticket. We said the dri­ver wouldn’t sell them to us. They said we were sup­posed to buy them at a tobacco shop. We said we bought them on the bus last night. They said get off here and buy your tick­ets at that shop over there. (Or so we think the con­ver­sa­tion went; hard to say when you don’t know the lan­guage.) So we all got off and fig­ured they’d wait and watch to see if we bought our tick­ets to ful­fill all right­eous­ness, but instead the bus drove off. I was so trau­ma­tized by the recur­rence of my mag­netic draw on ticket check­ers that I insisted we walk the rest of the way. We did, saw the tomb hold­ing the remains from a dis­tance (mass was just start­ing and we didn’t have time to stay), so that was that and off we went.

Hap­pily, the ter­rain today was noth­ing like yes­ter­day, and we only spent about 15 min­utes along­side a canal that was kind enough to curve through fields and forests. Pavia had a few more pleas­antly old churches—we are def­i­nitely out of Gothic and Baroque ter­ri­tory and into the Romanesque—and we got out first pil­grim pass­port stamp for the Via Fran­ci­gena at San Lazaro on the edge of town. We stopped for lunch in a tiny ham­let at what appeared from the out­side to be a hole-in-the-wall pizze­ria but turned out to be a charm­ing lunch­room stuffed full of peo­ple. We tried a short­cut (ha) that had us shoulders-deep in rice pad­dies and then slith­er­ing down a slope full of net­tles and pricker bushes into a ditch and back up again the other side. We read a few more can­tos of the Divine Com­edy (keenly feel­ing our igno­rance of Greek and Latin poetry today). In the evening we arrived in Santa Cristina to spend the night at the pil­grim hos­tel here and gave our greet­ings to a prayer group gath­ered in the con­sis­tory. And repented heartily of ever board­ing a bus with­out a ticket.