Talk on the street.

I got involved in a conversation in the fruit shop yesterday. The shopkeeper reminder a customer to close her bag where her purse was visible, telling her that another customer had her purse stolen from an open bag just a few days ago. This started a whole series of stories from customers about wallets stolen from pockets as people walked along. 

Then there were the gipsy stories. First of all, the one where they offer to help you carry your shopping and steal from you as you try to reject their help. Next came the one about the gipsies who come up to a lady and engaged her in conversation, stroking her face and arms and then asking if they could kiss her because she was so nice. As she tried to fend them off they snatched her necklace and ear-rings and left her with bleeding ear lobes. 

So, not to be outdone, I chipped in with the story told to me by a Spanish woman in Italy. She told about families of gipsies who wait near the main train stations in Madrid and approach obvious tourists, offering to help them find their way somewhere. While two harass the poor tourist, others pinch stuff from his rucksack and so on. The person who told me this story said that whenever she saw this happening she began to shout at the harassers, telling them she knew what they were up to and that she was about to call the police. Apparently it worked. 

The next contributor trumped us all: what she told us had happened to her! Personal experience! She was robbed in the Carrefour shopping centre. As she bent to point something out to her daughter in a shop window, someone lifted her purse from her bag. There it is again, that open bag. It had her debit card in and then there were the things of sentimental value like photos of the grandchildren. Shocking! Moral: keep your bag close and your purse closer! 

There is kind of irony in all this however. When I give in to the whining supermarket beggar and hand over some small coins, she says to me, “¡Que Diós te bendiga!” (God bless you!) This is a fairly standard response. But, it seems, Heaven help you if you come across those who want to show affection and then rob you. This last crime is unlikely to happen in the UK, of course. There it’s much more likely to be robbery with violence. You need a society where casual kissing and hugging is much more common, like the Spanish situation, for robbery with affection to take place. 

Mind you, I’ve not had any personal experience of such problems. For the most part I feel very safe here although I did experience an unsuccessful bag snatch in Barcelona a few years ago. In Vigo, though, I feel I can walk home alone without any problems. I’m just reporting the things I hear when I’m out and about.