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Blogs by Paul Cuenco
Pickpocketed
2/16/2012 10:28:56 PM
It was a glorious Parisian day. The sky was blue without a drop of rain. I am in my tidiest German outfit: a Bavarian hat, a well-pressed Italian shirt and matching linen shorts with shoes (without socks) to boot. I remembered carrying something with me, a roll of a picture, maybe. But I could not seem to recall. And I was with a beautiful Indonesian girl I just met at the hotel. We had a good time around town. It was like a date but not so. For when I leave town and she leaves town, all this dream-like aura would have disappeared. We took photographs hear and there, to remember perhaps memories of a wonderful summer in that moment in time.
We boarded a Metro going nowhere. Just like that. It was a lazy day in a foreign town. Then as the train was about to enter a station, I remembered that I did not button my back pants pocket and my wallet was in it. I saw the kid sitting on a chair just adjacent looking at me. I was standing up and holding unto a bar. So as I reached for my pockets and the train jerked all of a sudden. I held unto the bar for just a second and when I reach for my wallet in my back pockets, my wallet was gone. I immediately turned around and hugged the man who I thought stole my wallet. An argument ensued. We took the argument on the station steps. And like the locals do, the bad locals, when they were caught doing nasty things to tourists, they circle their ears with their fingers (a sign that the tourist was crazy.) In all these commotion, my girlfriend also had her wallet stolen. And soon, those petty criminals escape while a wallet flew up in the air and landed on the train tracks. I thought that the wallet was mine. But it was my girlfriend’s.
We filed a police report and thank heavens, she knew how to speak French.
Supposedly, I had been more cautious the next time I traveled to Europe. I would put my wallet in my front pockets, not be ostentatious and not carry anything that would call attention that would scream “TOURIST”.
So here I am in Milan. There was a bunch of American tourists being led by an American tour guide up the escalator of a Metro. (Again, the Metro.) The guide was facing me and they were quite ahead. It was a long ride and the escalator was climbing up sufficiently slow. Suddenly, the guide was yelling at me, calling my attention to something. I wondered what she was yelling about. “Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,” was all I heard. She repeated it twice more and I got the word “pocket” and “hands.” So I put my hands in the left front pants pocket to see what she was yelling about. And to my surprise, I felt a hand in my pockets that I immediately turned around and found a man trying to pickpocket me.
I held the man’s hand until we reached the top of the escalator. By then the group of Americans were huddling around me and the perpetrator of the crime. The guide offered to call the police. The perpetrator circled his finger around his ears (meaning that I was crazy). And I just let it go. If I report it to the police, I would have to spend time in Milan to prosecute the perpetrator.
Oh what was there to say? No matter how careful one was when one learned his lessons, pickpockets were bound to strike. C’est La Vie!
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