The Dodgy Italian and the Interpol Bust

It's a hot, sunny day in London. The novelty is not lost on me, nor on the millions of Londoners who are out in force in their lunchbreak.  After a rather lovely picnic lunch with a friend, in a small, but lush and verdant park, abundant with spring flowers (cue 'ode to joy'), I'm sitting on a park bench by the Thames, as the teeming masses go back into their office blocks.  I'm  reading my New Scientist magazine, working on my 'nerdy-cool' look (ha!), minding my own business, passing time until it's time to go and catch my plane to Portugal, when this old Italian guy (what is it with me and old men?) comes up and says hello...

'hello'

'where you from?'

'New Zealand'

'you want to come have coffee with me?'

'no, thank you'

'why not? I like you- you beautiful woman'

So I'm now wondering if that's so true then why would I want to go for coffee with an ugly old goat like him? But I've not been brought up to be nasty, so I say:

'I'm happy here in the sun enjoying my magazine.'

'you come with me, I pay for everything, you understand? Come see me in Roma and I pay for everything - planes, trains, hotels...'

...and he proceeds to open his wallet and show me wads of money in differing currencies.

Now, I'm seriously hoping that my sunglasses are concealing that momentary temptation flickering in my eyes - has god heard my I-need-a-job-distress and is sending me an answer!? Not an answer I would accept, but as I said: momentary. Perhaps lasting only a nanosecond. (Or two).

So I'm there, staring at this guy showing me wads of money in disbelief, when in blaze of televisionesque showing of badges, this cop from Interpol or something comes up and starts interrogating him-

'who are you? what are you doing here? why have you got all of this money?'

then got a highly technical, special, mini-micro-spy sized ...err...LED penlight out and started checking his money for counterfeit.  Surprisingly, it was all good.  So he chased him off with a few legal threats and turned on me.  The thing about this is that it all happened so fast that I wasn't quite sure what was going on.  The flash of badge was fast and aimed at the Italian, so I didn't get to read it, and wasn't quite sure if it was as he had said, or if this was a doubleact scam and I was entering phase II. So with a bewildered, nervous look, I told him that the Italian was hitting on me and I was telling him where to go. He warned me that these guys were after 'infomation' (for what? he didn't say! had I given him the information he needed?!?) and passports.  Having dual citizenship, I have two passports, so credit where it's due, he picked the right girl.  Time, place and presence of authorities obviously needs working on.


So, in the eyes of men, I went from man-stoppingly attractive, to potential prostitute, to gullible fool in about 5 minutes.
In my eyes, of course, I was just trying to read my New Scientist in the sun.


But wait, there's more -

On leaving the scene of the intended crime, I twisted my ankle in a pothole crossing a very busy road, fell over, grazed my knee, bruised my elbow,  totalled the lens of my digi SLR, couldn't get up because of my heavy backpack, with traffic about to approach with the light change. And lost my beloved cowgirl hat....it flew away and got squished by a car.  Oh, and when I did manage to get up I discovered that my top was unbuttoned to my waist.

I think London and I both agreed that it was time for me to hop on a plane and go somewhere else.