Scammed by a Slovac!!

[beergal]

So it was my own stupid fault for being so trusting and not learning Slovac but i thought i should warn my fellow tpunkers about travelling by train from budapest to bratislava and the return journey.

This weekend i went to the capital on the train and arrived with no problems after spending my halloween weekend there (and meeting lots of nice portugese people) I returned home only to be told i was on the wrong train going to Budapest!
Thouroghly confused i asked if i had mistakingly got on the wrong train and was this train going to Budapest. Conductor replied yes but i should have gone on the other route i was then made to pay a penalty of 30 euros. Thinking this was the end of the matter i fell asleep only to be woken up by passport control just after reaching the border of Hungary. After looking at my ticket i was told i was on the wrong train, god i wanted to kick this man in the shins when he told me i would have to pay a penalty! I tried to explain that i had already paid the "penalty" to the Slovac conductor....however....i was then told in Hungarian i should have only paid 10 euros to the slovac authorities and 20 euros to the Hungarian authorities...boo hoo...so now i am 50 euros out of pocket and Slovakia wasnt even that good lol

[Magnifico]

Originally posted by beergal1@Oct 31 2004, 10:32 PM
now i am 50 euros out of pocket and Slovakia wasnt even that good lol

Duly noted. That really sucks, too. We had a lot of dealings with passport control in eastern europe, but never ever had a problem like this. Maybe I amazed them with my incredible ability to count to eight in Czech. . .

[simply_angelic]

Originally posted by Magnifico@Nov 2 2004, 01:25 AM
Maybe I amazed them with my incredible ability to count to eight in Czech. . .

DEFINITELY!!!!!!!!!!! I know that that is always the first thing that I look for when making "important" decisions about a person...."how high can they count in my language?"...VERY IMPORTANT! ...good to know for future evnts though beergal, thanx

[urOZm8]

Hey thats too bad beergal. Really crappy. I guess there isnt much you can do when you cant speak the language.
I havent had that much trouble on trains except getting mega busted with my erasable pen (eurail) in Spain, but I knew what was going down hehe.

ev

[Somnambulation]

Heh, they snagged you for that pen? What did they do? To be fair, it wasnt really erasible ink, more water soluable.

[skidrage]

I had a somewhat similar problem as well. I had to take an overnight train from Berlin to Krakow and since the ticket office was closed I was told to buy a ticket on board. Well, since I don't speak any Polish, the conductor wrote down how much in Euro's I owed for the ticket, somthing like 12 euro which I paid with a 20 euro bill. The conductor then in Polish explained something to me that they could not pay me back in Euro's and I was paid back about 8 zlots (I think that is the Polish currency), which is about one and a half euro, when I should have been paid back eight euro's worth of zlots. That was one train ride I would never take again.

[beergal]

oh dont say that im meant to be travelling budapest to krakow at the end of the month lets hope i have better luck

[bellelass]

where does one aquire these pens exactly?

[state]

Sorry about what happened to you beergal that saaaaaaaacks!
I'm traveling europe right now and had a train incident in spain, it was purely of my own making though, I changed the 23 date on my eurail pass to a 28 but i was soooo stupid and did it badly and when they checked it they were showing me with a pen how i changed it, it was sketchy, but i just play the gonna-cry-dumb-tourist-card and got away with it, but it was intense at the time.
(on a side note i coulda used that f*cken erasable pen !)