TFR: The Border, Part II

(Editor's note. Sorry to keep you all hanging but Croatia is a really beautiful place and the views from the beaches are a lot nicer than the ones from the internet cafes.)

Where was I? Oh yes, we were in line, confidently walking towards the ticket taker. I handed our tickets to her and she started to punch them and let us through. Then she made an odd face, handed the tickets back to me, and pointed to a guy who wasn't wearing any sort of official uniform. We started to get upset and demanded to know what was wrong. Unfortunately the ticket taker didn't speak any more English than we spoke Vietnamese. So we moved on to the guy we'd been directed to. He looked to be about 21 years old and he spoke English passably well. Well enough to tell us that our tickets were for the train that left at 8:30 anyway.

After taking that information in and digesting it for a few seconds I said, "I'm sorry, did you say these were for the 8:30 train?" The answer seemed so obvious and self evident to him. At least it must have, given the way he looked at me and said yes. So now we have to start to deal with a little bit of panic that is slowly creeping in on us. We asked him to please elaborate further. I showed him the time on the ticket that said "9:20". In turn, he pointed to the line that said Train Number: SP2 and then pointed to the time table on the wall. Sure enough, right there in black and white it said Train SP2 - 8:30, Train SP4 - 9:15. We looked at our tickets again in disbelief. See, we had never checked the train number. The first thing printed on the ticket was the time and that's all we'd looked at. The panic had increased it's approach from a slow creep to a steady gait at this point.

Next, we tried our patented approach in these types of situations, we played dumb (easier for me than Cece). I pointed to the time and said, "but is says right here that it doesn't leave until 9:20". He looked at the ticket I was showing him, then flipped to the second one, which was stapled to the back of the first one. He pointed to the time on that one, which, sure enough, said 8:30. So that was the issue. The people at the train station or travel agency or wherever the ticket had been issued wrote the wrong time on the ticket that was stapled on top. We had never bothered to look at the second ticket because they were stapled together. I felt my face go flush with embarrassment as I stood there, thinking I was the single stupidest person on the face of the earth. Cece took a different approach. She decided to get persuasive. She told the guy it wasn't our fault that someone wrote the wrong time on the ticket. Then she told him that someone needed to take care of the mix up because we were getting on that train that was now about 15 minutes away from heading out of the station (it was a good thing she was around, because at this point I was speechless). The guy we'd been talking to apparently didn't take very kindly to her tone of voice and went into a hissy fit, which caused both of us to back up a little, then he stalked off. We sort of looked at each other with surpised faces because we sure didn't see that coming.

The next few minutes are a bit of a blur because, to be honest, the panic was starting to make itself felt. After catching up to the guy who'd walked away from us I was able to assertain that we had a couple of options. We could hop on the back of two motorbikes, fully loaded down with our backpacks, and chase the train to the next stop...a mere 40 kilometers down the road. For the briefest of moments this actually sounded plausible to us. We even went outside the station with the guy and found a couple of motorbike drivers willing to take on the job. Then our sanity returned and we thought about a few pertinent facts of the situation. 1) We didn't have nearly enough money to pay the drivers for the 40 km ride.

DRAT...time is up for now. Another to be continued!!