Pickpockets

Wow can't believe I haven't written a blog entry here since March 2012!  Time really does fly by!  God has continued to be amazing to me, my family and people around me, but I have been too busy and 'distracted' and full of excuses to move my hands to write blog posts to note things down.  I know how valuable these blog posts are in helping me keep track of God's goodness in my life and can be used for encouragement when going through hard times for myself of people around me.

This post is titled "Pickpockets" and it is what I'll be writing about.

I arrived in Paris with Kala on Wednesday 21st August.  We got off the Eurostar and after taking photographs beside the train we proceeded to look for buying train/ travel tickets.  There was a long queue down the basement for the ticket booth, and two other queues leading to tickets machines.  The ticket machine queues appeared longer so we checked out the machines.  Got to the machine but it said it only accepted card payments.  We had cash so proceeded to join the now longer ticket booth queue with our luggage and bags.

As we were queuing a man came up beside us and told us we could buy tickets from another machine.  He pointed to the direction away from where we were standing, to our right side, but we could not see much.  Yes, there was a machine there, but how could that machine be different from the one we just saw that only took card?  So we declined him.  He spoke in English and said something about the queue being long here.  We declined him again.  He asked us what we tickets we were getting.  We told him metro tickets (underground).  He got a bit desperate and told us that the ticket booth we were queuing at only sold tickets to the bus, but the machine that be pointed to would sell tickets to bus and train.  We just ignored him now and looked away.  He walked away without any success.

When he walked away the queue was pretty much the same, there were about maybe 7-8 people ahead of us waiting to be served.  The service was good, but the communication was slowed down by different languages and accents of various nationalities being together in a cosmopolitan capital.  So we thought, 'what if the guy was right?  he could have been trying to help us.'  So Kala went to check out the machine in the direction that the guy pointed at and I waited at the queue.

As she was away, a different guy came up to the man in front of me in the queue.  He asked this man, "Tu parle Francais?" (do you speak French?).  To which the man said he did, then in French the guy asked the man in the queue to go to another area and this time he pointed to another place behind us.  The man asked "Pourquoi?" (why?) and the guy told him because our queue was so long.  The man in front of me just shook his head, ignored the guy and continue queuing, looking ahead.  The guy walked away without success.  Kala returned and said the machine was the exact same one as the one we checked out next to the ticket booth.  So we remained queuing and I told her about the pickpocket, using Cantonese!

We got out tickets from the guy inside the ticket booth and all was well.  We proceeded to take the metro and walked towards the barriers/ turnstiles.  As were approached the turnstiles, we noticed a young looking man walking with a family of tourists.  For some reason, it looked like and felt like the guy was local but the family were travelers, from their dress sense and carrying of bags etc.  The young guy seemed to be leading them some place, near the ticket machine that we once were advised to go.  He was at that moment looking at the guy of the family and was talking to him whilst walking.  The guy from the family had a small map in his hand and walked towards the barriers.  The local guy seemed expecting of the family stopping at the machine to buy tickets, but the family walked on and the guy said he had tickets already.

As this was happening there was a voice shouting from afar, behind them, "Sir! Sir!" in the area we had just came from, and the man was approaching the family.  As the man got nearer I saw it was the ticket booth sales man who we got our tickets from.  He asked the family, "Do you know this man personally?"  The family said they didn't.  Then he said loudly, "Sir! Do not trust these people.  Do not follow them.  They want you to follow them to buy tickets but they lead you to a quieter area and they steal from you."  After I heard my eyes looked around for that local guy and saw he had quickly scurried away already, disappearing into the distance.  Wow!!  How dodgy was that?

So we are thankful to God for His protection over this event.  We could have easily fallen victim to these "kind gentlemen" and listened to their advice and went to the quieter, queue-less ticket machine to get our tickets, and who know what could have happened??  Got is good.  He is our protector!