Robbery

City life: bustling, ever-changing, and unpredictable. Today I had an adventure in city life. Today I learned what it meant to not trust people. This is new for me –I trust people and they then have to work hard to lose my trust, but I do not make people prove their trustworthiness to me. But today, in the heart of the city, I understood I little more why people live by the rule: “trust is earned.” We had a free afternoon from teaching today, so the four of us decided it would be fun to go shopping at the bazaar and downtown. We walked from our home through the park, across the big stone bridge, and into the old city. We passed the venders selling old rugs, handmade jewelry, and sketches of the city. We travelled past cafes, ice cream shops, and ended up in the bazaar –the biggest open air market in Skopje. This market is filled with all kinds of things: from meat, to clothes, to notebooks, to toys, to mops, to vegetables…and to so much more. We turn the corner into a tight tent space filled with tables which are covered with shoes and begin our feeble attempts to communicate and to barter. As I am standing at one stall admiring a stand of long, flowing skirts I feel someone bump into my right side. At first I think it is nothing –I mean this place is quite crowded and it is very easy to run into someone, but for some reason this bump caught my attention. I realized that my purse was also hanging on my right, and all at once I felt my purse moving. I quickly turned around and grabbed the opening to my purse and then watched as a grown, forty year old man, pulled his hand out of my bag. This manicured, older man is wearing a bright pink shirt and I watch in astonishment as he quickly disappears into the crowd. I had watched him remove his hand from my bag and I knew that his hand had been empty, but I searched through my belongings just to be sure something hadn’t been stolen. The shop keepers all asked –in various languages- if I had lost anything and then warned me to keep my purse close to me. I was a bit frazzled to say the least, but the thing that kept running through my mind was the description of the man who tried to rob me. He wasn’t some poor little kid or some hooligan; he was an ordinary Macedonian man. Why did he try to steal from me?