I recently was in Israel for two weeks and had an amazing time for the most part, with a few issues. One was that I was on a light rail in Jerusalem with my brothers. We bought ride cards from the machine, but it was very confusing, as the directions were primarily in Hebrew and the English directions were scarce and unclear.

When we boarded the light rail, we tapped our cards but they were not validated for some reason. I'm not sure what we did wrong. We later found out our cousins, who were also there, ran into the same issue. A patrol person for the light rail came around and scanned our cards. She told us they were not validated. She spoke very little English, which I understand since this is a foreign country, but it made it harder to communicate. We tried using Google Translate to explain the issue to her, but she still wrote up reports on each of us, saying we had 30 days to pay a fine of $50 US dollars. I wrote a complaint, asking for the charge to be dropped, but it was rejected.

The patrol woman who wrote the reports on us was very cold and stern, and showed no interest in trying to understand or hear us out, no matter what we told her on Google Translate. She asked us for our passports but we had left them in our hotel room because we did not want them to get lost or stolen while we were out. She then asked for our licenses and recorded them.

While I understand that we are responsible for validating our tickets, I don't think it's fair to penalize us with a $50 fine, especially when the instructions for buying the tickets were unclear and when we did try to validate our tickets.

I was told that if I don't try to pay the fine, it could affect my ability to enter the country again. But truth be told, I don't see how it could since she did not scan our passports but our licenses. The two are separate documents, and I don't think they could connect them in any way. Even if they could, I have another passport as I am a dual citizen of another country, and could just use that to enter Israel again, should I have another opportunity to go there.

Some Israelis over there told me not to worry or bother paying. One person said she tried to pay online but it didn't go through. Also, they say the patrol people are nasty and mean to everyone, including Israelis, and don't consider the circumstances or listen to your side of the story. I also think the woman could have given us a break since this was our first time riding the light rail over there.

The system is also ridiculous. I learned that if you buy a single ride from the machine, you are actually just purchasing the card but not an actual ride. What is the point of purchasing a card if you are not going to load any rides on it? Not sure if that's just unclear instructions or how it works over there, but it makes no sense. That wasn't the issue for me, but I just wanted to make a point of how the system is confusing and illogical.

I know it seems wrong not to pay, but the fee is ridiculous. My question is do you think I should pay or no?