Three Things the Guidebooks Don’t Tell You about Eastern Europe’s All-around Sketchiness

Sitting in the waiting room of the Sofia main bus station, the traveler gets solicited by another suspicious middle-aged man with dodgy English and even more dodgy purpose. He asks me where I am from, jot down something on a piece of paper, then walks away. Great, just great: another day in Eastern Europe, another day of being targeted for who-knows what scams the locals can dream up. The sketchiness of some locals is just too apparent, but still simply too commonplace a problem for travel guides to NOT address them more carefully to hapless, inexperienced, innocent-thinking tourists.

(1) The first kind is the most straightforward: locals squeeze foreign-looking people for money. But the methods are, from personal experiences, quite innovative. There are semi-legitimate exchange booths advertising deceptively attractive rates only to charge hidden fees (e.g. in Chisinau, every third shop on the main thoroughfare, one cannot help but wonder how many of them are legitimate, and how many paid bribes to the state to be there). The exchange booths are in many places, joined by equally dodgy-looking “casinos.”

Then, there are just outright efforts at robbery in the daylight. The traveler was again solicited by a group of locals trying frantically to tell me something in their broken English. Suddenly, an old lady walks over and pulls me away from the group. Only when we were half a block away from the group of guys she stopped and told me that one guy was distracting me while the others worked on pick-pocketing. Incidents like this, whether for scamming or stealing, make one seriously wary of talking to anyone on the street for any reason.

(2) And speaking of people soliciting on the street, the more intimate and legitimate-looking kind is perhaps more dangerous than the first. It is almost always the case that when one exit on an arriving bus or train that one is immediately greeted by warm, smiling people saying they are providing “tourist information” and immediately help the arriving travelers with their bags to the “information office.” Fortunately, this particular traveler has seen way too much of such tricks traveling in China, and has yet to see the results of falling for such a thing in Eastern Europe.

And the other intimate solicitation is simply disturbing. Even at one or two o’clock in the afternoon, attractive-looking local women talking to lone male foreign travelers at busy intersections and stations, asking if they would like to “have coffee.” The motive is quite evident. Once, when this traveler sternly rejected the offer from a woman who began to rub against me and call me “sexy.” The frustrated woman then attempted to drag me to her “scene of crime,” nonchalantly repeating, “c’mon, quick one, cheap!”

(3) The last one is not even about solicitation, its just pure sketchiness. In many Eastern European cities, the normal neighborhoods frequented by travelers may be only a couple of blocks away from the “abnormal ones” where locals are determined to punish the straying foreigners. For a traveler with previous unpleasant experiences, stumbling upon places such as Bucharest’s majority Gypsy neighborhood, which is literally a stone’s throw away from the main train station, can instantly bring about discomfort.

However, for the inexperienced traveler, they may not even realize that they have landed where they are not supposed to go until something happens. The “sketchy” neighborhoods over here are not like the violent ghettos of the US that also tend to be next to tourist spots in city centers. Over here, there are practically no physically observable differences between a “good” and a “bad” neighborhood. Houses and streets look completely the same, but the intentions of the locals residing the neighborhoods, well, are quite different, to say the least.

Of course, the traveler lists the unpleasant portions of the other side of Europe not because he discourages others from visiting the region, but to remind future visitors that they need to equip themselves with street-smarts they can never learn back home, especially if they are from relatively crime-free developed countries (Japanese and South Koreans, in particular, need to realize that their crime-free home countries make their mentality equal to those of innocent little kids...the local criminals know that very well). Only by thinking like the criminals and understanding their criminal procedures can the tourists be really safe.

Comments

  1. Hi from Trevor!!! Great post!

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  2. glad to hear you are still alive...what you doing these days anyways?

    ReplyDelete

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