Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Not again....

We spend a fun day with visiting friends at Aquaboulevard. The experience is a huge hit, except for the fact that my wallet is stolen -- again. I have the locker open for a couple minutes while I make trips back and forth to the dressing room, carting handfuls of clothes and helping the girls. I am about 4 feet away, checking the locker repeatedly when not standing by it, and only for a few minutes. But, I am told, there are professionals at work there, and they certainly case my backpack out perfectly. I only seem to get robbed when I have just replenished both cash and metro tickets, so again I lose about 120E.

Luckily, my carte de sejour is not stolen this time, mostly because it had already been stolen 3 months ago and was therefore not in my wallet. But I do lose my California driver's license, which I had stupidly forgotten to remove after using it recently to rent a car.  At least they leave my backpack, which contains my house keys (and we have a very expensive door to re-key), my beloved home-made hula skirt (since I head directly to a class afterwards), and my cell phone.

Anthony has been on my case recently to get a pretty smartphone, but the beauty of having an ugly stupidphone is twofold: 1) it's a lot cheaper and 2) nobody wants to steal it.

Ironically, many of the performers outside my door leave their CDs and cash unguarded, amidst the tourists. I guess tourists are mostly the targets, not the perpetrators, but still....

 

Postscript: In an interesting twist, I am now rather happy to have lost my CA driver's license. When I contact the DMV in order to get a copy, I discover that as of November, somebody has, somehow, changed my address on record to someplace in Texas. This happened since we've been in Paris but before either of my wallets were stolen and before I lost -- or even used -- my driver's license. So this has given me the chance to put a fraud alert on my credit report and try to protect my identity. Had my license not been stolen, I might not have known this for more than a year, till it expires. So my Texas thief has been thwarted. As my friend Mike puts it, "One criminal is just screwing the other criminal."





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