Europe Lessons #2: People and Trust

I’ve never been the most trusting of people, it’s true.

I usually take a while to get to know someone before I’ll tell them my secrets, lend them my stuff, be myself around them, and even then I’m always a bit wary.

Living in France, and Europe, has been a journey of trust and how I view people. And I’m sorry to say that I think it’s changed my perspective for the worse.

I’d never seen a beggar until I moved to Paris. There aren’t beggars in Melbourne. I’ve seen people selling The Big Issue on the street, sure, but even in the CBD late at night I’ve never seen disreputably dressed people with a suitcase full of stuff curled up on a piece of cardboard with a sleeping bag over the top. Here, it’s sadly normal. The metro stations seem to be a common haunt for them – dry, and not too cold. You can usually find them curled up behind the benches in Cluny-La Sorbonne or other stations around the centre of Paris. By day they usually take up stations on various street corners around Paris, dogs on their lap and containers and signs asking for money.

They’re not the only kind of beggars. People often get on the metro and walk up and down, asking for money, often with a small child in their arms. It’s mostly young Indian/subcontinental women that I’ve noticed (along with the odd possibly drunk, slightly disreputable middle-aged bloke who stands at the door of the metro and proclaims his poor fortune in a loud voice). I might be a little more sympathetic if they weren’t all reasonably well-dressed and neatly presented, with a good-quality baby sling strapped to their chest. Then there’s the RER beggars. They have a set of cards with information neatly printed on them in French asking for a euro or a ticket restaurant (meal coupon). There’s usually a date of arrival in France from some less fortunate country, the number of children or siblings they’re supporting and some other set of unfortunate circumstances that make them perfect candidates for charity. They walk through the train, placing these on seats next to passengers for you to read and leave a small token next to when they come back to collect the note.

Again, the RER beggars are usually quite well-dressed, and they clearly have access to a computer and printing services (and the money to pay for them) if they’ve got nicely printed cards. I’ve even seen one little girl, 11 or 12, walking through the train placing cards on seats, and with every card she put down she pulled a small disposable pack of tissues from her backpack and put it with the card, presumably as a gift for generous donors (nice purple backpack too, by the way). My first thought: if you’re so hard up for money, why don’t you just sell the tissues instead of giving them away? Sure, it didn’t end so well for Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Match Girl, but unlike her, these beggars aren’t in rags, far from it, and they all own baby slings or backpacks – definitely a step up from Little Match Girl Poverty.

Then there’s the older, apparently Muslim woman who sits in the stairwell at the Le Bourget train station with her hand held out, or the guy who approached me at the Barcelona metro ticket machines asking for my change. It happens so often.

All of this has made me very wary of my wallet and handbag. When I go to an ATM, I put the money straight in my purse and walk away as quickly as I can, because a young girl at an ATM would make a perfect robbery target, or even a good begging target, perhaps. On the metro, too, there are multilingual announcements to beware of pickpockets and keep your bags closed and in sight at all times. They’re not kidding, either. It happened to one of my exchange friends last semester. Her backpack was opened while she was wearing it and her wallet stolen from inside.

In Australia, I would never worry about closing my handbag while slung over my arm. Just not necessary. Here, if I can’t close it because I have textbooks in there then I flip the clasp closed to hold it together and then keep it tucked very tightly under my arm. When I first arrived in France, I was using my battered old backpack to get around with, and the zip on one of the outside pockets was broken, so I didn’t use it except for rubbish. More than once I had people try and close the pocket for me, or tell me it was open – even one of the staff at the Louvre sprinted down a corridor after seeing me from behind and noticing that my backpack was ‘open’. It’s not something that would cause alarm in Australia – in fact, people would probably think it was a fashion statement. Here, it’s a serious problem.

There’s more, too. There’s this trend, and I noticed it in Rennes as well as Paris, of 20- and 30-something Indian women running petitions for goodness knows what, hassling passers-by to sign it. In Paris they have a pretty much constant presence on the corner of Quai Saint-Michel and Petit Pont, about four of them at a time. It bugs me, and I’m surprised the authorities haven’t stopped it for the same reason, since that’s a big tourist area and it must be thoroughly off-putting for tourists to be harassed in any number of languages about some petition which means absolutely nothing to them. Headphones and complete lack of attention are usually pretty good at repelling them, but I did say no once to one who got very much in my face and received a jab in the shoulder with a pen for my troubles.

Usually when people like this come up to me I switch languages to whichever I speak that I reckon they don’t. Sometimes they switch too, if I’m pretending to be Spanish or French (somewhere other than France, that is), in which case I’ve distracted them long enough to make walking briskly past them possible, and other times they honestly believe that I can’t understand them and let me go. The technique is most effective on men who are trying to hit on me. Yes, sadly I’m serious.

It’s happened a heap of times now. I’m not talking about guys my own age flirting or being cute, I’m talking about men at least 10 years my senior trying to seduce me, literally. This one time in Strasbourg I was openly propositioned by a guy old enough to be my grandfather, who then decided to try and guess how old I was. “15? 16?” Apart from the insulting fact that I’ve worked hard to look my whole 20 years, I’m pretty sure THAT’S ILLEGAL. I mean, it is in Australia, and France isn’t THAT backward.

This was far from an isolated incident. There was the guy in Madrid who started off nice (“You look just like Monica,”) and got clingier and clinger. The one who groped me on the metro. The one who tried chatting me up as I walked down the street to my apartment. The one on the RER making eyes at me and giving me a creepy grin. I don’t encourage them – heavens, I don’t even KNOW them – and once I realise what they’re up to I do everything in my power to ignore them, avoid them, switch languages, whatever works.

If they were my own age (and a little less creepy) then it wouldn’t bother me so much. I could just put it down to some seriously inept flirting (and probably the fact that they’ve never had a girlfriend). My problem lies in the fact that I don’t think a single one of these guys has been under 35. In fact, I’ve been joking for months that I’ll throw a party if I get hit on by someone UNDER 35. These guys can tell how old I am – I barely even look 20, in fact – and they’re deliberately setting out to ensnare a ‘naïve’ girl who’s almost young enough to be their daughter. Such an age gap is far from socially acceptable when one of the parties is as young as I am, and it’s certainly not acceptable to me.

My lack of interest is no deterrent either, and that’s something that comes up in conversations about rape culture and sexual harassment. It becomes harassment when it’s unwanted attention. If you’re interested, show your interest, and if it’s clearly reciprocated, then take it further. If it’s not clear, back off. Well, I’m clearly showing that I’m not interested, and they keep at it. It makes me feel uncomfortable and threatened, but unfortunately, short of leaving France/Europe (an enticing solution at times) or becoming a hermit in my apartment, there’s no way I can avoid putting myself in the public situations where this occurs.

Case in point: at the youth hostel I just stayed at in Rennes, there was this African guy in a blue jumper, late 20s-early 30s, who was very familiar in the way he addressed me, winked at me, right from the start. Me, being wary, avoided him and his gaze, only saying a polite hello over breakfast, that sort of thing. Basically avoided him for the whole time I was there, showed no interest and showed that I was actively disinterested. At the train station today, I ran into the Canadian friend I’d made (who, incidentally, was not scared of blue-jumper guy like I was) as we were both boarding our trains. “Oh, by the way, that guy at the hostel wanted me to pass on a message to you. He wanted me to tell you that he thought you were very pretty.” We both burst out laughing, since I’d already confided to Canadian my experiences of creepy people hitting on me and we both agreed this guy was a player.

But how was that sort of comment appropriate? Blue-jumper KNEW I didn’t want to talk to him, didn’t even want to look at him, and yet it’s OK for him to send flirty messages to me like that? The way I see it, not cool, and yet it’s happened so often that maybe this is actually the norm in Europe. I hope not. It’s not fair on the girls is happens to, for a start, and it’s not exactly promising for respectful relationships between men and women around here – I’m talking about in the workplace, in the shops or in cafes, as much as in romantic relationships. If this is how guys in Europe think they can treat girls…what does that say?

Between all of the above experiences, I’m now terrified every time someone approaches me that they’re begging for money or going to hit on me or asking me to sign a petition or going to tell me that I have ‘beautiful eyes’ (they must learnt this one at their mother’s knee, ‘cause I’ve heard the exact same line from about three different guys). I practically cringe when I see them coming, and I’m actually relieved when I hear the native Anglophone accent of a lost tourist looking for help. I don’t open up to people or chat to random strangers in the street, always terrified that I’m going to give too much away and they’ll use it against me somehow.

And even when someone doesn’t fit into one of the previously identified categories above, I’m still wary of interacting with them in case they’re some variant I haven’t met yet. Like the boy in Rome, 12 or 13 years old, who tried to help my parents with their luggage at the train station, tried to help us find our seats, tried to help us get settled on the train, and all in the hopes of earning a few euro. I in return was almost outright rude as I refused to acknowledge what he wanted, since we’d refused his help the whole time. I hate that I’ve turned into this rude, dismissive, sheltered, fearful creature. I hate that Europe’s turned me into this. I wish I could change, go back to the open, carefree person I used to be. I hope, in a friendlier country like Australia, I can.