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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: elmatador who wrote (131187)	3/1/2017 11:40:53 AM
From: Elroy Jetson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 217516

You're not missing much. There's no part of Italy which is honest or less annoying. But many people enjoy themselves because they're not aware they're being cheated and abused. The first time I entered Italy I drove in from Switzerland. As soon as my little Peugeot drove over the pressure plate I could see I owed a toll of something like 12 billion trillion Lira, which was about 1/3 less than the value of a 5 Swiss Franc coin. So I handed the toll taker a 5 Swiss Franc coin and he literally looked at it for nearly a minute, turning it over and over and finally announced that this was Swiss money and this was Italy. It's Sunday so the bank, "she is closed", I can't return to Switzerland, five feet to the reverse, as I am told I had already activated the toll counter. Well I can be unreasonable as well, so I grabbed a guide book, got out of the car and sat on the roof of my car reading. This prompts rapid conversation by the toll taker to himself accompanied with various shrugs and signs of disbelief until he called the office. A tiny many with a 6 inch tall general's hat arrived pulling on his coat. After he ascertained the problem he asked me to pull over to his office saying with great lamentation, "They're supposed to take all kinds of money, but I can't make them do it !" He changed enough Swiss money to Italian to get me to my destination of Fiorenza. Once there I joined some friends from Germany and an Italian from Florence who operated a night club in Berlin. We went out to dinner speaking German, which the nightclub owner kindly supplemented with Spanish for me when I didn't understand. We had a great time until the bill arrived and the nightclub owner looked at it. He stood up and started speaking loudly enough in Italian for the entire restaurant to hear, while the mortified and cringing restaurant owner came over red-faced and apologizing profusely. I asked him what he said, and in Spanish he told me, "I told him I had grown up in this city and asked him why he would humiliate himself like this in front of foreign guests, because the bill included taxes which didn't exist, in addition to charges which differed from the menu and things nobody had ordered." That's Italy, at least once or twice a day. If you're clueless you think you're having a good time. But if you understand it simply becomes endlessly annoying." Speaking some Italian is an advantage, but only so long as they don't know you speak it. I've seen bullshit like an illegal police detour from the AutoStrada on the way to Monaco, leading to a small village where it's allegedly illegal to turn around attracting a fine from the local police who illegally placed the barrier on the highway. Unlike the long line of others I refused to pay, so a tourist from Iowa paid my "fine". Locals, I learned, merely get out of their car and hurl the detour barrier signs and flares off the side of the highway. Italy is the most dishonest and thoroughly corrupt nation I've ever been to - and I've visited a lot of Third World nations! The fact that I've been to Italy repeatedly over the years, I have only myself to blame. When my oldest nephew visited Switzerland and parts of Europe last summer during college, I was very gratified and amused by how much he disliked Italy, a generally filthy and disordered country in addition to the dishonesty. My husband had never been to Italy and disbelieved by stories. So when were in Nice, after spending an afternoon driving through the high-rise capital of Monaco etc, I drove south to San Remo Italy for dinner, for the experience of the "Italian Riviera". I parked the car in the town center and he was fearful and anxious, blurting out, "This is worse than Tijuana Mexico." - "Benvenuti in Italia il mio principe !" It seemed worse than it was at that moment because the streets were filled with smoking scooters during commute time. We chose a restaurant for dinner, and just like finely tuned clockwork the bill included two items we didn't order and tax which doesn't exist - which the restaurant owner took off the bill professing ignorance of how this could have happened as the waitress rolled her eyes, because he prepares the bills. Everyone else in the restaurant thought they were having a good time. A month later we later took a train from Lugano Switzerland to Lake Como in Italy, where predictably the bus wasn't running that afternoon due to some work stoppage. The restaurants didn't cheat everyone, but the ferry system did, taking advantage of the bus lines being stopped. The Ferry charged for an express boat then supplied a slow one instead. The hundred people on the ferry were outraged! I said "Benvenuti in Italia !" and I laughed and shared stories. Of course, always book the Swiss train, never an Italian train. They're inexplicably the same price, yet the Italian train is Third World while the Swiss train is - well Swiss. Italy is a fucking cesspool. Sicily is nice, if you enjoy the mafia and graft and kickbacks being built into the price.

To: elmatador who wrote (131187)	3/1/2017 12:06:42 PM
From: Elroy Jetson	Respond to of 217516

I must again share this quote about Italy by my Great-great-great-Grandfather who spent time in Florence. Of course to his great annoyance, my Great-great-grandfather Alexander A. married an Italian woman from Milano whose Mother was from Spain. He was a professor of anatomy and they lived in Lausanne and had nine children. Alexander A. in the front row with his children in Lausanne. My Great Grandmother to the left has her arm around her father-in-law.