My three friends and I had just spent a beautiful couple of days in Rome and decided to train-it to Florence. We packed up our bags, checked out of the hotel, and cabbed it to the train station. The train station was extremely crowded and the people made up an eclectic crowd. My two friends watched the bags while I bought our train tickets―which ended up costing around 150 euros total. I checked three tickets on the ticket machine and pressed print. I reached down to grab the tickets and nothing had printed. We were all so confused. We went to the ticket office and were told that someone had stole them and there was nothing that the ticket office could do about it. I wanted to yell at them, demand my ticket back, but the language barrier made it impossible for me to do so.
At first, I became extremely flustered and stressed over the situation. “How were we going to get to Florence?” I thought. “We’ve just spent the money we allotted to our Florence Trip, where, unlike Rome, we had a place to stay for free. None of us have money, us speak Italian, or have a way of getting home (to our home away from home at least) to Paris. We’re screwed.” But, after about 15 minutes, I realized that the three of us stressing out was doing nothing to help the situation. I decided to go upstairs, to the other ticket office, and try again. I took a different approach in the upstairs ticket office, however. Instead of getting mad, I basically explained to the guy the situation (as best as I could given my limited Italian vocabulary). At one point, I even started to tear up. Fortunately, the man had a 19 year old daughter and therefore could empathize with our situation. He could see how frazzled we were. The man said there wasn’t a way for him to retrieve the tickets we had already purchased and insisted on buying us new tickets. We politely accepted his offer and tried to take down his contact information to reimburse him, but he refused. He played it off like it was ‘no-biggie’ and waved us off with a big smile. I will never forget this man’s good heart; we were complete strangers and he didn’t have to help us, but he did. I am so grateful for him. It gives me hope to know that there are people out there who are truly good people, who want to help you and do not expect anything in return.
As you can see by my photos below, we ended up making it to Florence and had a great time:
At the steps in Sienna
Paris is always a good idea. 