Repost from the 'other' board
Several years ago, I got sent on a training course. Ordinarily, this consists of sitting in a dull room in Slough drinking rubbish coffee, wishing that the poem would come true and not even caring that you'd still be there when the friendly bombs did their stuff. But not this course. This course was in Monte Carlo.

Fantastic though this was, my employer's generosity didn't extend to paying for hotel rooms in Monaco. Rather, it decided to put its four employees up in Nice, and we'd commute by train every day.

As the only one with any discernable French (good GCSE, forgotten, and a handy phrasebook, unread) I was left to do most of the talking. We got by, with my best "je voudrais" and "s'il vous plait" and lots of pointing, catching the train every day from Nice-Riquier station to Monaco station.

Nice has at least two stations (it may have had more, but we wouldn't have cared if it did). Nice Central is big and important and all the trains go there. Nice-Riquier is none of those things. It was, however, close to the hotel, and had several commuter trains to Monaco every day. These facts will be important later.

After a few days hopping back and forth across the French/Monagesque border, it was time for a night out in Monte Carlo. The details of this are best left forgotten, but they involved losing money at the casino, and a dash for the train at the end of the night.

As we got to the station, the train was standing waiting. It was going to go any second. There wasn't time to go to the front of it and read the destination, so I crossed my fingers, prayed I would make my French teacher proud, and, spotting a likely-looking Frenchman lounging in one of the train's doorways, asked "Ce train va à Nice-Riquier?" Ok, so it wasn't brilliant, but the question was simple enough, and it wasn't "Does this train whizz through Nice-Riquier without stopping?" Our helpful homme answered "Oui! Oui!", and, to make sure we understood, beckoned us to enter the carriage.

We began to get suspicious as we zoomed past all the local stations our usual train stopped at. Perhaps this was a late night service which stopped at fewer stations.

Or no stations except Nice-Riquier.

Or not Nice-Riquier either.

Maybe it was an express to Paris? What do the French do to you if they catch you without a ticket? I could have asked our formerly helpful local, except he'd slunk off somewhere.

No, it's stopping at Nice. Now we just have to get a local train back to Nice-Riquier, and not get caught travelling on an invalid ticket.

Yes, "un billet". Singular. At some point in the journey, we discovered that three of our party were ticketless. Not because we hadn't bought them, but because when we'd used the machines previously, they'd printed a ticket for four people on one piece of paper. And now they hadn't, and, presumably, three of our tickets were still sitting in the machine. This too, would be tricky to explain when your railway French extends no further than "Où est la gare?". And no ticket inspector wants to know about the monkey in the tree.

Fortunately, this is a story with a happy ending. Not that happy, as all the trains were running late and we had to spend a half-hour wait being sworn at by an Italian who obviously thought our presence had infected the French rail system with some sort of British Rail Incompetance disease, but we did eventually get back to where we started, unbothered by les gendarmes.


C'est très long
( le brian, Tue 3 Jun 2008, 15:05, 3 replies)

La sange
a sur la branche.
(Bazongaloid, Tue 3 Jun 2008, 15:08, closed)

C'est super
*clic*
(Pavlov's Frog figures no-one really reads sigs anyway, Tue 3 Jun 2008, 15:09, closed)

Le souris est en-dessous de la table
le chat est sur la chaise
et le singe est ... disparu!
( Maladicta, Tue 3 Jun 2008, 16:35, closed)