An Honest Mistake?

It's easy to feel vulnerable as a tourist.  Unless you know the language perfectly, and walk around town without your safety blanket -- day pack, camera, etc, you stick out like  a sore thumb.   This is especially true with my unfortunate choice of a bright blue pack with Eddie Bauer scrawled across the top.  In any case, the places we were going were frequented by tourists, even when we tried our hardest to blend in.  So, looking around, everyone eating at restaurants were tourists.  This should not be surprising, because there were 20 or 30 hotels within a few blocks.

We had found a pleasant, inexpensive little pizzeria-trattoria on our first day, and were treated well by the friendly waiter with the good sense of humor.  The next night we wanted to try the restaurant recommended by the hotel staff.  It was a bit pricier, and looked a little more refined.  Although we showed up at the usual dinner hour of 7:30, we were turned away because we didn't have a reservation. Reservation -- what a concept!  So we slinked back across the street to the simple place that treated us well the first time. 

Our meal was good, and we were happy.  The waiter seemed a little confused a few times about what we had ordered, but all turned out well in the end.  Upon asking for the conto -- the bill, the waiter proceeded to tally up the bill, scrawling a few unintelligible characters on a pad of paper, with a clearly legible total at the bottom -- 41,50.  This seemed high to us, so we recalculated on our own, and came up with 36,50.  Upon challenging the amount, we all recalculated together and came up 34,50, which suited us even better.  The waiter was a kindly, yet harried older man.  Susan gave him the benefit of the doubt, but I wasn't so sure.  It's so easy to take advantage of tourists who don't know how things work.  It would be so easy to play this game and hope the charade goes unchallenged. 


I hate to do it, but it always pays to be on guard.  Fortunately, usually Susan or I are on guard while the other spaces out, so we're covered.  We go through periods of paranoia, and then trust, like when we leave our luggage in the hotel reception area for the day on our last day in Florence with no baggage tags or other identifiers, trusting that the sometimes friendly and sometimes surly desk staff won't let someone walk away with our bags.  I wonder if anyone ever asks for a luggage tag?