In Which I Fall for the Oldest Trick in the Book

I had a long day yesterday. I got up at four o'clock in the morning, was travelling for most of the day and arrived back at the Stazione Centrale at half past eleven at night. Mr. A was coming to pick me up in the car, but my bus got in early, so I had to wait for him outside the station in the area where the airport buses arrive.

That part of town has a bad reputation, so when a man approached me saying, "Taxi, taxi, taxi?" I made a point of saying,"No, grazie" very firmly and walking off. Unfortunately, I did have to wait for Mr A, so I stopped a little further down where one of the airport buses was getting ready to leave and there were plenty of people around and put my two bags down at my feet to wait. 

I was tired, hungry and somewhat pissed off by this stage. Then a second guy approached me and asked me where to go to catch a train. I could tell from the way he asked the question that he wasn't really looking for a train and assumed I was in for the usual, "You're not from here, where are you from, do you have a boyfriend" conversation, so I decided the best thing to do was just to give a quick answer and then ignore him and, if necessary walk away, but he pretended not to understand my answer and I had to repeat it. It was then that I heard someone on the bus banging on the window and shouting, "Put it down! Put it down!" I turned around to see one of my bags lying on the pavement a few metres away and another guy running away around the back of the bus.

In years and years of travelling in big cities in Europe, this was actually the first time that anything like this had ever happened to me. I get the "friendly" harrassment conversations all the time, but I'm usually really good at looking after my stuff. In fact, all my important things were in my handbag, which I was holding on to (although I wouldn't necessarily have noticed if the guy had tried to pick my pockets), and I think the thieves would have been pretty disappointed to open up the other bag and discover nothing but an English newspaper and the remains of my packed lunch, but what scared me was that I didn't even suspect what the two guys were doing. I was so busy expecting one kind of problem that I forgot to be open to other possibilities.

So I guess what I learned from this was: hold on to your luggage, because just watching it isn't enough, and don't ever let yourself be distracted. And I hope that if I ever see anything like this happening to anyone else, I'll be quick thinking enough to stop it as the people on the bus did for me.