Yesterday, I arrived from a two week vacation with a few friends, where we stayed in a small town in northern Italy, in a town called Varese. One of my friends happens to be extremely rich and Italian, and so he invites us to his 11 acre estate every year.
It is a long walk into town, so we usually take the bus, where the fare is 1.05 euros for a ticket valid for 75 minutes. Usually, you can buy a ticket with a machine on the bus (which doesn't give you change if you don't have a very elusive 5 euro-cent coin), but one day they were randomly turned off, not allowing us to buy tickets. We didn't really care much, as we thought it was broken and so we didn't have to pay. Unfortunately, it was a trap. A few stops later, a town official boarded the bus and requested tickets. As none of us spoke Italian, except of course for my Italian friend, we were lost. An argument ensued between him and the official, and eventually they finished and the official walked around the rest of the bus requesting proof of the ownership of tickets. When he walked away, my friend explained to the rest of us that he would be calling the police on us, and that we were supposed to buy tickets for the bus in random shops inside of town (kind of handicapped seeing as the point of the bus was to bring us into the town). Even my friend didn't know this when we took the bus. The next bus stop, we were forced off of the bus with the official, where two cops were waiting. They asked for identification, which of course we didn't have seeing as the only form of it we had inside of the country was our passports, and we didn't carry those around everywhere. My friend started talking to them in Italian, and eventually he explained to us that we had to pay a 'fine' of 35 euros each. We paid up, and as we were walking away, he explained to us what really happened. He had struck a deal with the cops, asking what we had to do to not be arrested. The bribe was the only way, he said.
tl;dr I miss the Roman Republic.
