You never think it’s going to happen to you until it happens to you.

I was enjoying my vacation in Greece. After taking the bus down from Blagoevgrad to Thessaloniki on the last Saturday of the year, I met a young, world-traveling couple, she from the UK and he from Germany, in a place called simply “The Pub.” We drank Mythos beer and swapped stories, and just before midnight I found a cab and then poured myself onto an overnight train to Athens.

There, I got together with my friend Amalia, who runs the Aegean Arts Circle and the writers’ workshop I attended in the summer of 2013. I watched the New Year’s fireworks over the Parthenon, and took a ferry to Crete the next night. I walked the grounds of the Minoan palace of Knossos, where legend tells of Ariadne helping Theseus slay the Minotaur and find his way back out of the labyrinth by marking his passage with a golden thread.

I used all forms of public transportation other than airplanes, including the Athens metro, a modern and efficient subway system for which one can buy a 5-day pass at reasonable cost. Friends in Greece had warned me that the metro is rife with pickpockets, and for the most part I’d been careful, sliding wallet and passport into a front pocket and keeping an eye on the people pressed around me.

On the second Saturday of the trip, the return ferry pulled into Pireaus, the port of Athens, just as dawn was breaking. I had booked a hotel in Corinth, on the isthmus of Greece between the northern part of the country and the Peloponnese, the peninsula where much of our western civilization gestated. I took the metro down to the area of the Acropolis and had breakfast at a restaurant where I’d eaten a few days earlier, paid the bill, and then re-boarded the metro for the main railway station to buy a round-trip ticket to Corinth.

When I got off the subway, my wallet was gone.

Interruption in body-brain connection- There is an important icks.org cialis generika role to play when it comes to a man’s ability to control their bladder. Unfortunately, such drugs often lead purchase cheap viagra to inflammation and other side effects. icks.org purchase cialis online Of course, there are various factors that can cause impotence. Read a lot find here buy viagra of customer testimonials to find out the rates for the very same medicines through online pharmacies. I knew immediately what had happened, though I did retrace my steps to the restaurant to make sure I hadn’t carelessly left it on the table. No such luck. My carelessness had been to stuff the wallet into my back pocket, along with my passport, which thankfully I still had. I never felt a thing.

It was mid-morning in Athens, the wee hours in the United States, and here I was in a foreign city with no money but the few Euro and Bulgarian coins in my pockets. I had to think. The first thing to do was find a WiFi connection and stop my debit card and credit cards. Then I had to report the theft to the tourist police, who took a report and expressed perfunctory sympathy – and allowed me to use a telephone to call my credit card company, which doesn’t accept e-mail reports of lost or stolen cards. Not for the first time, I wished I’d bought a smart phone before coming to Europe – but that’s a story for another day.

I am blessed in this life to have a reliable partner. I must also thank the good people at the Hotel Parthenon, where I had stayed for my first three nights in Athens. They allowed me to sit in the lobby for several hours and use their WiFi until the sun rose over America and Lisa got my messages. They brought me coffee and sandwiches, and I reserved a room for the night. Thanks to Western Union and the miracles of modern communications, by evening I had cash and could pay for a place to sleep.

Sunday dawned clear and beautiful. I would have felt joyful, but that morning all I could think about was who might have my wallet. I checked my accounts on-line to make sure there had been no fraudulent activity, and then I tried to find things to do in Athens that didn’t cost money. I climbed Lycabettus Hill, at 300 meters above sea level, the highest point in the central city. There’s a church at the top, and a café just below it, and in front of the church a guy was selling beer and souvenirs from a little kiosk. One looks down at the Acropolis from there, and out into the Mediterranean.

I felt a little of my old optimism returning. It could have been worse. Corinth would have to wait for another trip, but I’d had a nice vacation. One incident wasn’t going to ruin it.

Less than an hour after the train to Thessaloniki pulled out, the guy in the seat next to me dumped a cup of white wine in my lap. At least it wasn’t coffee.

[wpdevart_like_box profile_id=”slowertraffic” connections=”show” width=”300″ height=”550″ header=”small” cover_photo=”show” locale=”en_US”]