Skip to main content

Welcome To The Real World

We had a last look at Leon and a picnic lunch in El Retiro gardens,Madrid. Then a quick belt across Spain in the Renfe Avant, the Spanish equivalent of the TGV to Barcelona, the city of Miro and Gaudi and Picasso. Barcelona is a lesson to the world in what modernism may have produced if it hadn`t sold out to commerce and utility. Everywhere there are inventive, wonderful buildings as useful as they are beautiful. Late in the evening we saw The Palau de la Música Catalana, and while we were still closing our jaws we were robbed.

Barcelona is famous for two things above all else; architecture and thievery, which are both done with intelligence and panache. We had done everything right: valuables back at the hotel, essential stuff next to the body, not much money on us. A young man hailed us and asked for directions. Being used to the cameraderie of the Camino I stood with him while he spread his map on a wall. Suddenly two guys in leather jackets approached and produced police identification. They searched the young guy then demanded to know why we were talking to him. Were we buying drugs? Were we illegally exchanging money? Could we please produce our passports and turn out our pockets? Passports and pocket contents were examined. They nodded, apologised, shook our hands and advised us to go back to the hotel as this was a dangerous neighbourhood. We did, only to find that my wallet had been emptied of cash - about 100 euro. We had been well and truly rumbled by a gang of three, who were onto a good little earner for 10 minutes work. At least they left me my credit cards. We would have been well and truly stuffed without them.

We left this morning on a painfully slow train through the sleazy industrial parts of Barcelona. At Montpellier we caught the train for here, the leafy city of Lyon where we will beware of young men bearing police identification until we can land safe and sound at Taize tomorrow afternoon.
Labels:

Comments

Margaret said…
Well the people whose home we are housesitting at the moment had their rental car wheel clamped in France a couple of days ago, and it cost them 120 euros. That was after they had driven onto the race track itself in Le Mans by mistake. So if you see a couple of bemused Kiwis on your travels, ask them if Margaret and Graeme are housesitting for them. lots of love.
28 May 2009 at 10:35
Alden Smith said…
That ripoff is a bit of a classic ruse. We were told of a more alarming one. You are approached by a weeping woman who throws a well wrapped baby at you - as you let go of everything and reach out to catch the baby (that turns out to be a very life like plastic doll) your luggage is quickly snatched by accomplices and off they all go.
There is also another scam where you are approached by someone holding a gold ring or another piece of jewellery - I forget exactly how this works, but I know the end bit - yep you loose all your luggage.
It seems a crying shame that you can be put off talking to or helping someone out of fear of being mugged but that in many tourist spots is the unfortunate reality.
The advice I was given was to scan the crowd in busy spots and look out for people scanning the crowds of tourists. If you are approached and you are very suspicious tell them to F... Off - if all goes well they may well understand English.
28 May 2009 at 20:42
Kate said…
Panache indeed!
29 May 2009 at 08:38
Kelvin Wright said…
Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and in retrospect there were many warning signs: a guy asking a tourist for guidance and not a local for instance.There were also a few brighter ways we might have handled the whole process. Yes, we've heard of some of the scams and were approached a couple of times in Paris with the have you dropped this ring routine, but the essence of a good scammer is to surprise people, and this one caught us by surprise.

Would it happen again? well, not the fake cop scam but probably something else. The way we traveled meant that we relied on the goodness of strangers all the time. We found our way across Italy France Switzerland and Spain largely on our own and with a few words of Spanish, some rudimentary French and absolutely no Italian between us. Perhaps a couple of dozen times a day we asked for help,sometimes because we had not the foggiest idea of where we were, sometimes because we couldn't read menus or find the right kind of shop. Whether it was Perdon, senora, donde est un supermercado? or Ou est le Gare du Nord? We were invariably shown the most astonishing kindness, including by people in Barcelona. I guess we were helped over a thousand times. We were robbed once. I hope I can keep that statistic in mind and be open to the goodness of people rather than be dominated by suspicion because of the antics of a couple of daring and quite likeable scumbags. 100 euro was a small price to pay for the amazing human contact we enjoyed in 4 wonderful countries. I guess we'll be fair game for the next one in a thousand who has a bright idea for separating me from a few euros.
3 June 2009 at 04:17
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

    The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse  - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire.  Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon...
Post a Comment
Read more

Kindle

 Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been  using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on.  I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incomp...
10 comments
Read more

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and...
3 comments
Read more

The Traitor

A couple of people have questioned me privately about the Leonard Cohen song The Traitor , and about Cohen's comments on the song, "[The Traitor is about] the feeling we have of betraying some mission we were mandated to fulfill and being unable to fulfill it; then coming to understand that the real mandate was not to fulfill it; and the real courage is to stand guiltless in the predicament in which you find yourself". What on earth does he mean, and why am I so excited about it? For the latter, check with my psychiatrist. For the former, my take on the song is this: The Traitor is another of those instances, as in The Partisan , where Leonard Cohen uses a military metaphor to speak of life in general and human love in particular. Many of us hold high ideals: some great quest or other that we pursue. These are often laudable things: finding true love, finding the absolute love of God, becoming enlightened, spreading the Gospel, writing the great novel or some such ...
8 comments
Read more

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede...
Post a Comment
Read more