Come For The Fun, Stay For The Bureaucracy

How do you say "Digital Divide" in French?

Last year, I bought all of my train tickets in France using an app on my iPhone. You paid for the ticket and picked it up at the station. This year, the national rail service (SNCF) has a new app that lets you buy and receive tickets on you mobile device. Sounds convenient, right? Enter the French bureaucracy.

I bought one ticket successfully with the app to get from Toulouse to Pau, but I got overconfident, and my second ticket had a small problem. The calendar on the app begins with Monday, not Sunday, and I selected the wrong day. When I tried to look up the reservation on the SNCF website, it didn't exist. That's because the app, OUI.sncf, is run by another company.

Of course it is.

Like a digital scalper for concerts, OUI.sncf has lots of tickets to sell. And, they're discount tickets. But, they're non-transferable, non-exchangeable, non-refundable, and SNCF staff is unable to help you with "those internet tickets bought on a mobile device."

I called the customer service number for OUI.sncf, and they told me to go to the station. I've lived in enough countries to know this wasn't going to work, but I felt I had to do it just to say I did. Sure enough, the young woman at the ticket counter wouldn't even look at the ticket on my phone. She said I had to go through the website. Yeah, sure thing. Right back at ya, karma wheel.

Before leaving the ticket counter, I suggested using my Tuesday ticket for Monday travel. The destination, train connections, and price were all the same. She said, "Sure, go ahead." My plan is to use that as my backup. If that doesn't work, maybe play the dumb foreigner? Final option, cast shame on the lack of an integrated ticketing platform for the French National Railway?

French train workers are still on strike. Luckily, they haven't shut down the whole system. Select lines are canceled, but it's not bad enough to make daily headlines. It's large enough to be annoying but not severe enough to affect tourism.

I witnessed a drug bust on my 2.5 hour ride from Toulouse to Pau. There I was, listening to Trevor Noah's "Born A Crime," when seven members of the Gendermerie — some wearing light blue shirts with official logos on the back, others wearing bullet-proof vests and led by drug sniffing dogs — raced past me and began interrogating some twenty-something passengers several seats beyond me.

After what seemed like 10 minutes of back and forth, the police moved to the next car and nabbed another guy. He seemed to be handcuffed when I saw the police escort him off at the next station. Pot is illegal in France, but I've smelled it in the streets of Toulouse and Pau. I don't know what drug caused the bust on the train.

My conclusions: buy tickets at the station, and don't do drugs.