Pickpockets in Athens

NOTE: I am back-dating this post to the month and year where it belongs. But in reality I am actually writing it more than five years later, the evening of January 13, 2023. I think I've got most of the details right, however.

Two weeks after I visited Debbie while on a business trip to Sticksville, Marie and I went to Greece.

Neither of us had ever been to Greece, and we wanted to go somewhere together. And I've wanted to visit Greece since I was a little kid. So we decided, We're grownups and we're neither of us tied down by other commitments—let's go! (It probably helped that I went to Peru with Son 2 a few years ago … helped break my mind out of a rut, if nothing else.)

The trip lasted a little over a week. We spent five days in Athens, a day taking the bus to Delphi, then a couple of days in Delphi before coming home. It was a lot of fun. We did touristy things and ate well. Most of the photos show one of us or the other, so I won't include them here. I will, however, absolutely endorse George the Famous Taxi Driver for his firm's wonderful service: one of George's drivers took us from the airport to our hotel, by way of a beach where we stopped to swim in the Aegean Sea, and a restaurant where we had the best lunch. Worth every penny.

I could write a whole post just about the food, but I won't. And many of the sights we saw were normal touristy sights that you could hear about from anyone. But I'll tell you a couple of stories that are maybe a bit more personal.

One of them happened on Ohi Day. We spent the day wandering around Athens seeing parades and crowds, and finding a lot of places closed. By the end of the day we found ourselves at a national museum of antiquities, and immersed ourselves for a few hours. (Incidentally, the next time I go to Greece I want to spend less time with antiquities and more time in bars or restaurants.) By the time we left it was evening, and we wanted to get back to our hotel. We found our way to the nearest subway stop, and there was a train already boarding. So we joined the crowd to make our way inside.

The crowd was bigger than we guessed, however, or something. Once we were there I felt myself lifted up off my feet and pushed into the car. Then it felt like someone was grabbing at me, and I heard a voice shout, "He went that way!" (In retrospect I should have been suspicious at hearing English, but I wasn't thinking.) So I wrestled my way back off the train to look for a fleeing suspect; Marie saw me leave and bolted as well, to stay with me. Right away the train pulled away, and of course there was nobody on the platform running anywhere. I checked my back pocket, and my wallet was gone … on the train, obviously, in the hands of someone cleverer and more devious than I am.

Well, shit.

Marie's purse was safe. She said someone had grabbed for it too, but it had an odd zipper mechanism that made it impregnable when it was on her body, and it was strapped to her almost like a backpack. So that was good. It was just me who had been robbed.

What to do? It took me a few minutes, standing there on the platform, to clear my head of all the emotions and realize that there was nothing else we could do that night expect go back to our hotel. So when the next train came along, we got on it. I was taking hold of myself and walking through the logical steps. What was in my wallet? About €200 in cash, my bank card, a credit card, and my driver's license. (Thank God I had emptied out the slips of paper with all my accounts and passwords before we'd left home!) Clearly the cash was gone. The driver's license could be replaced; but since we weren't driving in Greece, I wouldn't worry about it until I got back to the USA. That left the bank card and the credit card. Fortunately, Marie had brought her laptop computer on the trip, in case she wanted to do some writing, and the hotel had Internet access. I was able to go online and report my credit card stolen. When I tried to do that with my bank card, I got the password wrong (just because I was so rattled); but I called the service number, identified myself over the phone, changed my password, and reported that card stolen as well. When that was all done we told the concierge at the hotel (who doubled as the owner), and he gave us a long, sad story about how pickpockets haunted downtown and preyed on tourists, and we had to be very careful. He also told me that the next day I had to go to the police to file a report, even though the odds were that I would never get the wallet back. (And I did so.)

Marie paid for everything for the rest of the trip. I asked her to keep an accounting, and we settled up after we got home. I was kind of dazed for the rest of the evening—stunned, shell-shocked. I think I managed a couple of feeble jokes. And then the next day we were back doing other things again.

But it's interesting … Marie said (some time later) that in a strange way, she was glad it happened; or rather, that if something bad were going to happen she was glad she was there to see it. Specifically, she said she was glad to see how I reacted to a crisis like that. She said she knew plenty of people who would react by losing it: by yelling indiscriminately, and by blaming everyone around them irrationally. And I did none of those things. It made her feel much more comfortable and secure about the relationship.

I'm glad she feels more secure. It's certainly not because I'm any kind of saint that I act like that. It's just that, when I feel truly threatened, I shut down every extraneous reaction so that I can focus on what to do; and I step myself through the situation rationally because I feel completely lost, so that logic is the only tool I have left. I suppose it's some sort of fear reaction, rather than any grand virtue. Or whatever. Anyway, that's what I did and what I do.