On Apr 2, 2010, at 6:46 PM, Hadriel Kaplan wrote: > Not to belabor this thread, but... > I was in Schiphol the week before IETF Anaheim and bought a train ticket. *None* of the my cards worked (Amex, Visa, Mastercard, and a debit, and yes I tried all of them). In fact, not only did they not work at the machines, but they were not accepted at the human-based ticket counter either, despite my having a Passport and one of the cards even has my picture on it. They had a sign even warning that it wouldn't work without a "PIN". It was cash only, but there is an ATM near by. I travel a lot and was quite surprised. This was my experience as well (I travel a lot, to many countries in Europe and Asia, and have never had a problem until I travelled to the Netherlands last year) --- except my ATM card didn't work, either. When I talked to my bank, they told me it was because of fraud problems in that country specifically; I would have needed to warn them at least a few days in advance i was planning on visiting the Netherlands for them to put my card on a special authorization list. Maybe all of my credit card providers (Amex, Chase, Citigroup, etc.) are losers (actually, the problem with Amex was that the train station didn't accept it, not that my Amex card didn't work. Ultimately Amex was the only card that worked for me, and I ended up getting a cash advance using my Amex card), but if I were you, I'd bring Euros, and make sure you inform your bank and credit card issuers in advance. I've never needed to do this before when traveling to other countries, and I've never had trouble getting local currency out of an ATM machine, so I had gotten complacent.... -- Ted _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf