Lisbon subway

Location: Lisbon, Portugal

We were going to take the subway to somewhere. Probably a museum. We walked downstairs into a subway station. It was almost empty.

The train arrived and we got on board. All of a sudden, a bunch of people came from seemingly nowhere and jumped into the car with us. They looked like they were actors cast as subway passengers in a Hollywood movie. There was a businessman with a briefcase. There was a skater kid. There was a professor type wearing glasses. All told, there were probably 8 or 10 people in the group.

These people surrounded us (mostly me) to give us the impression that the subway car was full, even though there was almost nobody else in the car. Once the car started moving, they started jostling me. They were doing a poor job of pretending that the subway ride was very rough.

Throughout the Europe trip, I had been wary of theft and didn't wear my backpack on my back when we were in a crowd. But the subway platform, and the subway car, had been almost empty. So my pack was on my back. The insta-crowd made me nervous and I tried to take the pack off a couple times. But each time I tried, somebody in the crowd bumped or pushed me in such a way that I couldn't.

This entire time, Mike and Jacob were just standing in front of me, looking at me, looking bored, and definitely not noticing that anything unusual was happening.

"Let's get off at the next stop," I said.

"Why?"

"I'm getting pushed around here, this sucks," I said. At that point, I don't think I had fully realized that I was being robbed, but I was uneasy enough that I wanted to get out of the situation as quickly as possible.

As soon as the doors opened at the following stop, the crowd that had been surrounding us disappeared instantly. I checked my backpack. The main compartment had been unzipped and my new digital camera was gone. I checked my pockets. My wallet was gone, too. I turned around and jumped out of the subway car, ready to chase somebody. But it had taken me a few seconds to check my things. That was enough of a head start that, by the time I had a clear view of the station, I could only see the last two people running away. They were already at the tops of opposite staircases. I had no idea which one of them had my stuff, or if it even was one of those two. I was paralyzed with indecision for a second. Then I thought, doing something is better than doing nothing. I lurched in the direction of one of the staircases for four or five steps before it fully dawned on me that I'd never be able to catch either one of them anyway. I must have looked ridiculous.

At a loss for what to do, I walked up the stairs towards an exit. There was a security booth at the left, with two police officers. I told them I had just been robbed. Their English wasn't great and I had to repeat myself a couple times. They looked at each other, shrugged, and asked me what I wanted them to do about it. I couldn't think of anything.

I had to report my cards as stolen. The sooner the better. But that's easier said than done when you're standing in a subway station in a foreign country, you don't have a modern smartphone (it was 2007), you don't know your card numbers, and you don't know the phone numbers of your banks. The only thing I could think of was to call my mom (international roaming fee: $2 per minute), tell her what happened, give her the names of the banks, and hope that she knew enough of my personal information to convince them to cancel the cards.

Thank you, mom.