Crime and Punishment

I’ve always felt safe in Spain, and I still do, in spite of having now been involved in three separate criminal incidents, all in Barcelona.  It is a big city and tourists make easy targets, I suppose.

The first incident I wrote about earlier — my tire was slit by a motorcyclist hoping to persuade me to let him “help” me repair the tire — a ruse to rob us.

The second and third incidents occurred within 24 hours.  My friends Don and Doug, owners of the highly rated bed and breakfast, Oakhill Inn in Natchez, and I were returning to our Airbnb apartment in the Gothic Quarter after dinner, when we were approached by a man who appeared to be drunk.  He said he wanted to dance the rhumba with us!  Pretty quickly, my friends deduced that it was a scam.  At the same time another guy appeared, seemingly to warn us that we were about to be robbed.  The first guy then grabbed a rubber hose from a nearby trash bin and swung it at Don, missing.  I got the door open and we leapt inside, but we were shaken.  Don thought the two might be working in concert, but we’ll never know.

The next morning when we went to retrieve my car from the parking garage on our way to Montserrat, we discovered that the driver-side rear window had been shattered.  Nothing was taken – I had left a leather jacket and another coat in the car, along with a few other things.  Only my time was stolen — my punishment, I suppose, for being a tourist with a foreign license plate.  My car is leased through Renault Eurodrive and so bears red French plates, different from all of the other EU plates.

It took almost 6 hours to be on our way, having to change all plans in order to report the incident to the garage management, report to Renault Eurodrive, make a police report, take the car to the Renault Dealership for repair, and go to the airport to rent a temporary car.  What a day!  It was tedious, sometimes confusing between English, Spanish, and French, but in the end, accomplished.  The highlight was meeting Ruth, an internal auditor for Renault who happened to be at the dealership.  She took it upon herself to help us through the process — though it was in no part her job — and then take us for beers next door while we waited.  She even had a beer herself and a few cigarettes and then went back to work!

In the end, it was only a loss of time, but I may not take my car into Barcelona in the future.  Live and learn!

We finally made it to Montserrat!

Below is the abbey built on the mountain of Montserrat (meaning serrated mountain in Catalan) founded in the 11th century to enshrine the image of the Black Virgin, the Virgin of Montserrat.  It was rebuilt in the 19th century.  The Abbey is beautiful, but the mountain is spectacular!!