I Trusted That Ticket Stealing Grandma

A friend stopped by for lunch today and during our excited ponderings, we discussed some of my craziest travel adventures, including my encounter with the ticket-stealing Grandma on an Italian cross-country train.  After he left, I began to reflect on the complexities of trust and relationship building when you’re on the road.  Have your own cultural perspectives on safety and relational norms affected the way you interact with others while you’re traveling?

It was my first solo trip to Europe. After a brief stopover in London to see friends, I continued on to Italy for a whirlwind tour of Milan, Ivrea, Genova, Cinque Terra, Pisa, Florence and back to Milan in five days.  On my second day in town, I mustered up enough Italian — “Per favore, un biglietto a Ivrea” — to purchase a ticket to a small town bordering the Alps to visit a local design school.

Dragging my behemoth of a suitcase up the steps and through the train car, I plopped my daypack and my ticket down in the empty four-pack of seats near the door.  I heaved the bag over my head onto the luggage rack above and sat down with a sense of accomplishment, until I noticed a woman at the other end of the car staring at me like something bad had just happened.  I patted my clothes, rubbed my nose and checked my teeth for any offending protrusions.  When everything passed muster, I chalked off her strange looks to a lingering curiosity over the Americana that I must have been exuding, shrugged my shoulders and settled comfortably into my seat.

As we awaited the first lurch down the track towards Ivrea, I heard the conductor approaching and reached for my ticket only to discover it had disappeared.  Did I drop it on the floor? Stash it away in a quickly forgot spot? Did those masterful pickpockets I’d read so much about claim me as their latest victim? Can’t be. No one had come close enough to touch me since I boarded the train.

The unassuming little nonna (grannie) sitting across the aisle from me looked concerned at my rapidly swelling panic and in a surprisingly masterful command of English inquired if everything was ok.  She cooed comforting words and encouraged me to look harder in the hidden spaces of my bag for the missing ticket.  When the conductor arrived, she even jumped in to translate on my behalf. Whatever she said seemed to engage his sympathies and he moved on to his next set of patrons.

For the next hour, my new nonna chatted about little snippets of her life. Then, somewhere in the midst of the Italian countryside, the train stopped and she stood, grabbed her 1950′s suitcase and bid me a friendly farewell.  As we continued on to Ivrea, I reflected on the morning’s events, feeling thankful for having met a new friend in this strange land.  Then, I suddenly realized something very unsettling.   Nonna was the one person who got close enough to steal from me. I turned my back to her just once when I lifted my suitcase overhead, and she could easily have reached over and swiped the ticket. Her efforts to soothe and ameliorate only served as a distraction to suppress my suspicions until she disembarked. Struck by the cunning brilliance of my elderly opponent, I wandered through Italy for the next few days with an invisible bubble of protection encompassing me.  Yes, I allowed no one to come within two arms length of my passport, currency and prized electronics, but that also meant I was forced to maintain an emotional distance, limiting my access to the wonderful people and personal accounts that awaited.

In subsequent trips, I learned to take more risks with people on the road. In some cases, I was too trusting and returned home with an equally crazy arsenal of stories. But, in most cases, I met real people who helped me see past the image carefully crafted for tourists, into a balanced view of real life.

I learned that for meaningful travel experiences to develop, a well choreographed dance between trust and cynicism, naivete and awareness, fear and risk-taking is required.  Here are some tips, gleamed from my own epiphanies on the road, for how to achieve this balancing act.

1. Have an open mind/heart. You will not be able to embrace what’s unique and different about a culture until you open your mind and heart to the experience and let go of your own preconceived notions and a locale and its residents.
2. Talk to people. Strike up a conversation with some locals. Ask questions. Swap stories about life back home.  Most of the time, they’re just as curious about you, as you are them.  If you’re nervous, you don’t have to approach a total stranger. Start with someone who you’ve already communicated with in a more formal capacity – employees at your hotel, the owner of the little cafe where you’ve eaten breakfast a few times, the guide who led you on a walking tour of the city – and then take the conversation into more casual territory. Maybe they’ll offer to take you to a few local hang outs when they’re off duty.
3. Familiarize yourself with the popular local scams. Pickpockets in places like Pisa, Sicily, Barcelona and other cities around the world are infamous for their well-crafted art of distraction and slight of hand.  But, many of them recycle similar scenarios that play on the trustworthy icons — innocent grandmothers, sweet old men, mothers with crying babies and offers of friendship replete with convincing mock sincerity — that our human nature and cultural training tells us are safe.  If you perform a few quick Google searches, you’ll find lots of insight into how the local scams operate and how best to protect yourself.  Don’t obsess over it.  Just get enough knowledge to be able to recognize a scam when one’s coming your way.
4. Assume it will happen to you and prepare accordingly. Is getting your pocket picked really the worst thing in the world?  In most cases, it’ll just be an annoying inconvenience, but with a little pre-planning, you can minimize the overall impact. Armed with this knowledge you can just relax in your surroundings despite what might happen.

Passport:  Scan and email a copy of your passport to yourself and to family/friends back home. The backup copy will help things go faster at the local embassy if you need to get a new one made.

Money: Don’t carry more cash than you need at any given time. Split up the money and store it in different pockets/places on your body. If per chance a pickpocket does get to you, they’ll only get a fraction of what you’re carrying.

Secret stash: The more important it is, the closer it should be stored to your skin or intimate body parts.  There are tons of options available – bra wallets, undergarment waist bags, sock wallets, shoe wallets, wrist wallets, hidden pockets. Store your more important items there and don’t keep reaching for them or accessing them in a public setting.

Leave it behind:  Leave expensive jewelry, electronics & other valuables at home or at least locked in the safe at your (hopefully reputable) hotel.

5. Don’t throw all your common sense out the window. There’s something about being in a new place that makes it easier to shed your inhibitions.  While you’re striving to be more open-minded, don’t let go of all the wisdom you gained back home.  Getting drunk with strangers is probably not a wise idea. Or, as a solo female, you might want to rethink that invitation to follow that charming guy you just met to a strange, dark place on the promise of checking out to a local hot spot.

To sum it up, an open heart tempered with a little common sense is the recipe for making a meaningful connection with the culture around you.  From your own adventures, have you trusted too much? trusted too little? taken too many risks?  Tell us about it and please share any additional tips you’ve learned in process.