Day 468 ‘Closely Observed Trains’ 5/12/2012

After spending 12 hours with travelling on various busses, tubes, trains on both legs of my journey and a flight in between I tempt to feel a bit desperate to get home. I am tired, hungry and thirsty and just want to be in The House with The Garden. By that time I normally lose all my well-behaved compassion towards bureaucracy and find it quite difficult to produce a polite smile, when either the conductor or the border guards cross question me on the international trains after looking at my train ticket and my languages if I am really just travelling to my final destination, which is the last village before the train takes off to Romania or I just pretend and try to slip through the system without a valid ticket for international travel. The same thing happened today with the addition of a rather strange request from the Hungarian Train Company impersonated by the conductor on duty. Because I only have a train ticket to the last village (which is my final destination) before the train enters to Romanian soil, I am requested to move to the rare of the carriages 30km before the village to make sure I will get off and not try to sneak to Romania without a valid ticket. This is outrages! Hello! Just because I have two pieces of luggage and I live in a bordering village I am not a train jumper. This is discrimination!

Of course I didn’t change seats as I had the right to sit in any of the carriages I wished to. It was a slow train with no additional tickets required. And of course I got off at my final destination, before the train took off to Romania. And of course I found out, this was the conductor’s guerrilla tactic to try to avoid a train jumper on the train if I was one. But I wasn’t. When I questioned him about the authenticity of the rule, he suddenly lost his official manner and became very polite. He never came back to usher me to an ‘inland’ carriage.