If you're staying in Italy (or anywhere outside your home country, for that matter) and doing overnight trips in different regions, BRING YOUR PASSPORT!! My friends and I booked a weekend trip to Venice and took the fast train there. The train from Florence was just about two hours so since we left at 5:45pm, we got to Venice at 7:50pm. The hostel we booked was a seven minute walk from the Venice Mestre train station so we started walking with our backpacks, open umbrellas (it was pouring rain) and purses in that direction. Walking, we passed restaurants and thought to ourselves "I can't wait to eat once we get to the hostel and put our stuff down."
We arrived at the hostel and I was pleasantly surprised. Now mind you, this is the first ever hostel I am staying in so I don't know what to expect here. The hostel lobby was huge and had a band getting ready to play a set. There were people playing board games and cards, it was so bright and fun looking. If you don't know what a hostel is, it is like a hotel but instead of individual rooms for each person or small group, they have rooms that fit a certain number of people. So, depending on how many people you are traveling with, your group can be in one room by yourself or with random people who also decide to book a hostel stay for that night. Since we are a group of six people, my friends and I all would have been in one room with no strangers. We haven't seen the room yet, but it definitely looked like a safe and cute spot to set up for the next two nights.
With wet umbrellas in hand and backpacks the size of a small child, we walked up to the front desk and the lady asked us question number one: What name is the reservation under? I'm not sure why, but whenever I book a reservation or buy tickets for anything, I always fear they are invalid or I never pressed confirm or didn't buy it properly. That was not the case here, we told her our name and she had our reservation which was a sigh of relief.
Then came question number two: Do you have your passports? Our faces dropped and we all looked at each other because we all knew nobody had their passports. It was almost comical because we are literally foreigners here. Why would we travel without proper identification of who we are and where we are from? The funniest part about the whole thing was the fact that we asked each other if we needed our passports before we left and collectively decided it was unnecessary to bring them.
Back to the front desk, we told her we didn't have the proper identification and asked her if we could use our drivers license ID from the United States. Turns out they don't accept that as a form of identification (obviously). Then we asked if we could send her a photocopy of our passports (because we all had those) and turns out, they don't accept that either. She flat out said "without your physical passport, there is nothing I can do for you guys." That sentence in itself was hard to hear especially now at almost 8pm and we were stranded in Venice (two hours from our apartments in Florence) with our backs about to snap in half from carrying our backpacks and now we had to figure out the plan for the rest of the night. Oh, and mind you, it is dark and rainy outside. Perfect.
We threw a lot of ideas out there and even tried negotiating with the front desk lady but she didn't budge. Some of the other ideas included finding the next train home but there were no more trains so it would have been a bus that took two times longer to get home than the train we just took here. Another idea was to go to dinner and then go home (the hangry-ness started to set in, for me at least.) The last idea someone threw out there was to try a hotel across the street and see if they would feel bad for us and let us check in there.
We wander across the street, homeless at this point, and find ourselves in the lobby of the hotel across the street. The lady was hesitant at first but once she heard what had happened to us and that we did have PDF copies of our passports, it was a no brainer for her, she let us have the room. We had to get three rooms with two people in each but in all honesty, it could have been worse, right? After having one of those "what just happened" conversations, we put our bags in our rooms and decided we all needed food....and a drink.
I was told to never travel with your passport (except for initially entering a different country) because of the possibility of it being stolen from you. Going through getting a new passport is a process in itself, especially in another country and I just didn't want to lose my passport, plain and simple. But, it turns out, we are foreigners in a different country so that means we need our passports on us when we travel. EVERYWHERE.
BS
