Ever been mugged while traveling?

It's the worst, away from home and you get your stuff jacked. I grew up in Miami, one of the planet's dangerous cities (Not up there with Johannesburg and Sao Paolo, but still) So, I grew up naturally being wary of my surroundings. So, I go to Sydney, Australia, which has a very low crime rate when compared to Miami. And there in Sydney I managed to get mugged on the corner of Cleveland and Abercrombie. I didn't have much but they stole my cellphone and $5AUS. Five dollars is nothing, but I had to go out and buy a new phone.

Anyways, I've told y'all my story. Let's hear y'all's stories about being robbed or mugged while traveling.

Oh, I've got another one. I was walking past the coliseum in Rome and this woman walks up to me. She raises a hand and she has two fingers together and she is jabbering on in Italian. So I thinks she is looking for a cigarette by the way she is waving her hand in my face. So I said in very bad Italian that I don't smoke. But she came in very close to me. She had a young girl with her and the young girl moved around behind me. Afterward my buddy said he saw the young girl feel me up looking for my wallet, but my wallet was inside my shirt. Now, normally I have no problem with 15 year old girls getting close and comfy with me. But this one? No. When the woman got up close it took about a quarter second for me to realize what was going on and I threw the old woman to the floor and started yelling and cursing at her in Spanish. I figure it's close enough to Italian that she would probably get the idea. I called her all kinds of dirty names and she jumped up and she and the young girl ran off

 

I spent a few weeks in The Philippines in the 80s. One of the things I wanted to do while there was buy a bunch of rattan furniture. So I made the mistake of asking a trike driver (they use motorcycles with sidecars as taxis) where I could get some.

He took me and my traveling partner through a maze of back alleys and then to a courtyard bar filled with young men carrying machetes, introduced us to the bartender, his "brother" who poured us each a beer. The trike driver stepped out for a few minutes and the bartender started fast talking us about this or that. Next thing we know the trike driver comes back visibly angry, saying we've kept him waiting. His time is money, we owe him $300. And the bartender says we owe him $50 each for the beers.

Bear in mind that in the Philippines, you can get arrested for slander if you call someone a thief or a swindler. So we shut up, paid them, cut our losses and walked 5 miles back to our hostel. No rattan this trip.

Rule of thumb: Be nice but don't talk business to people you don't know.