Friday, 26 November 2004
sometimes irony is not so sweet
Know what this is?
It’s an official Greek police report. For my stolen cell phone. Which was taken from my coat pocket while I was at the EasyInternet cafe on Syntagma Square on Wednesday night, writing about how much I loved Greece. <sigh>
It’s not a disaster—it had a prepaid Greek SIM in it with only €4 of credit left, and my mother cleverly purchased trip insurance before we left which will probably cover the cost of replacing it. My US (Cingular) SIM was locked up with my passport in the hotel safe, and is ready to be put into a new phone when I get home, so my phone number won’t change. It was not an ideal note on which to end an otherwise lovely trip…but it did provide fodder for a blog entry on what happens when someone steals something from you in Greece.
In order to file for reimbursement, one has to have an official police report. The phone was taken at about 8pm, but I didn’t discover it was missing until we returned to the hotel, around 9:30pm. If I’d been smart, I would have looked in our travel guides and discovered that Greece has a 24-hour telephone “tourist police” line that I could have called for assistance. As it was, the people at the front desk directed me to the closest Athens police station, and assured me that the four-block walk was quite safe at night. (It didn’t feel that way, walking down darkened narrow streets, just after having had something stolen, but nothing untoward happened en route.)
When I arrived at the police station, a uniformed officer posted outside who spoke no English finally understood my pantomime of a pickpocket and directed me to the fourth floor. Apparently they begin numbering at -1 in that building, because I had to climb five flights of stairs to get to the fourth floor, including two floors with jail cells full of boisterous young men.
Upon arriving at the correct floor, I found 7-8 young men dressed all in black, some with police jackets, all gathered in one office laughing and talking and smoking. They finally seemed to realize I wasn’t going away, and one who spoke limited English got the basic story from me. He spoke at length with the men in the room, who somewhat reluctantly cleared their gunbelts and jackets from one of the desks and found a chair for me to sit in. Then one of the officers (and not the one with good English) began to fill out the paperwork. He asked me for my name (first asking me to say and spell it, then asking for my passport), my parents’ names (you’d think at age 42 that would be irrelevant, but apparently not here), my date of birth, my current address, etc. He stopped after every few words to chat with his friends, take a few more drags on his cigarette, and occasionally re-read what he’d written, mumbling aloud to himself. While he did that, a few of the men passed around my passport, leafing through the visas to see where I’d been.
After taking about 30 minutes to fill out one sheet of paper, he then handed another sheet to me for me to fill out—which included all the same information! I stifled my irritation, filled it out, and handed it to him. Then he compared what I’d written, what he’d written, and my passport.
Finally, after all the paperwork was done, he told me I’d have to come back the next morning at 8am to get my copy of the report. I headed back to the hotel, arriving around 11:30pm, and went to sleep.
This morning, Alex and I set back out for the police station (I was hoping that having a beautiful, blue-eyed, blonde boy along with me might speed things up a bit). I was directed this time to the 3rd floor, which was four flights up, where a sullen young woman told me that the report wasn’t ready, and that I should come back tomorrow. “I can’t,” I told her, “I’m leaving in two hours for the US.” She sighed heavily and told us to wait in the hallway. Twenty minutes and two trips up the stairs later, she had an official “copy” (hand-written, as you can see, not a photocopy) of the report for me, which cost me €0.45.
As I said to Alex, however, we’re pretty lucky to have had a trip where that was the worst thing that happened. Nobody got hurt, nothing irreplaceable was lost, and it didn’t cause any significant disruption. Our trip home was relatively easy and uneventful—the planes left on time, we made our connections, there were no nosebleeds or additional run-ins with pickpockets. We’re home now, and tomorrow I’ll start uploading the photos to Flickr. Stay tuned!
