Watch out, the transvestites are armed with pepper spray!
It seems the past few weeks, we (trainees) have had some bad luck with theft. For three consecutive weekends one of us has had something stolen. First, Nikki got her brand new cell phone stolen straight from her pocket as we were walking down Istiklal for a night on the town. Next, it was me getting my nice, warm jacket stolen from a club (the cell phone my host family had lent me was in the pocket). Finally, Nikki’s good friend Alex, who was visiting from her traineeship in Czech, got her wallet magically stolen from her purse. We suspect it could have happened while we were being pepper sprayed by transvestites while negotiating cover for a bar. Apparantly we were being too loud and so they came out started kicking one of the guys and all of a sudden everyone was coughing, weezing and crying. Some people got it straight in the face too. Ahhhhhhhh. One has to be soooo careful here. And as foreigners we are prime targets. Well I guess these things happen while you travel regardless of all the precautions you take.
Rolf Potts (ya ya ok you knew that was coming) got robbed and drugged in Istanbul and wrote a piece about it called ‘Turkish Knockout’. It ends well….so here’s the excerpt:
“Anyone who's been robbed clean overseas will know that the days following your robbery provide a kind of masochistic therapy. Amidst the tedious hours of down time in various police stations, consulates, and traveler's check offices, you have ample time to re-examine each individual thread of your demise.
To retrospectively pluck any one of these threads is to watch the robbery neatly unravel into some idealized parallel future. It's a torturous, yet irresistible exercise.
In time, this exercise of memory renders things relative: it makes you realize that things could have been much, much worse; it makes you realize that, bad experiences, on the road or otherwise, help you appreciate good experiences otherwise forgotten. You come out, in the end, with a sense of wonder at all those other, un- seen moments when the threads of chance fluttered-nearly connecting, but not-just past the periphery of your life.
And then, once you have replaced your passport and filed away the lessons learned,you resume weaving. Because you now know there is a certain holiness in the notion that those threads exist at all.”
Rolf Potts writes an independent travel columnjor National Geographic Adventure, and his work has appeared in Best American Travel Writing, Cond6 Nast Traveler, National Geographic Traveler, Travelers'Tales Greece, Not So Funny When It Happened, and Salon. com. He is also the author ofVagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel. Hefeels somewhat at home in Bangkok, Cairo, Pusan, and Wichita, Kansas.
Rolf Potts (ya ya ok you knew that was coming) got robbed and drugged in Istanbul and wrote a piece about it called ‘Turkish Knockout’. It ends well….so here’s the excerpt:
“Anyone who's been robbed clean overseas will know that the days following your robbery provide a kind of masochistic therapy. Amidst the tedious hours of down time in various police stations, consulates, and traveler's check offices, you have ample time to re-examine each individual thread of your demise.
To retrospectively pluck any one of these threads is to watch the robbery neatly unravel into some idealized parallel future. It's a torturous, yet irresistible exercise.
In time, this exercise of memory renders things relative: it makes you realize that things could have been much, much worse; it makes you realize that, bad experiences, on the road or otherwise, help you appreciate good experiences otherwise forgotten. You come out, in the end, with a sense of wonder at all those other, un- seen moments when the threads of chance fluttered-nearly connecting, but not-just past the periphery of your life.
And then, once you have replaced your passport and filed away the lessons learned,you resume weaving. Because you now know there is a certain holiness in the notion that those threads exist at all.”
Rolf Potts writes an independent travel columnjor National Geographic Adventure, and his work has appeared in Best American Travel Writing, Cond6 Nast Traveler, National Geographic Traveler, Travelers'Tales Greece, Not So Funny When It Happened, and Salon. com. He is also the author ofVagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel. Hefeels somewhat at home in Bangkok, Cairo, Pusan, and Wichita, Kansas.
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