So I realize that I am very behind on this blogging, but I think that it's worth while to do this a little bit out of order and share today's story with you.
To celebrate our last day of class, two of my friends and I decided to go share some mate in Parque Las Heras, which is about 3 x 3 blocks in between Palermo and Recoleta, arguable the two safest neighborhoods in the city. I think you can probably guess from the title what is about to happen, but, shockingly enough, this took place at 1:30 in the afternoon...broad daylight about 100 feet from a busy street. About 15 minutes into our mate, a man that I thought was selling newspapers walked by. I motioned that I wasn't interested in buying one, but he came and knelt down in front of us. He introduced himself and shook our hands (which was uncomfortable, but that's not unheard of for someone making a hard sell), and I was about to tell him again that I wasn't interested in buying a newspaper when it became clear that was not what he wanted. He opened a newspaper in front of us and told us to put all of our money inside it.
He talked very quickly and very quitely, so I didn't catch every word, but one of my friends grew up in Puerto Rico and I was able to more or less fill in the gaps afte the fact, but he said something along the lines of: "Do you understand me? Keep smiling and don't try to leave, everything is great...I am a man of the street and don't want to hurt you so do exactly as I say." He claimed to have a gun in his pocket (which was probably not the case, but I'm sure he had a knife at least...I wasn't going to find out) and asked for all of the cash out of our wallets. I was worried he was going to take my wallet with my drivers license, school IDs, and (most importantly) my debit card, which i keep hidden in the wallet. I kept it out to show him that it was only IDs and nothing of value to him, so that was lucky.
He pointed out his friend, who was keeping watch about 50 feet behind us to make sure we didn't try and leave, then he asked for our cell phones. (We were all pretty calm from the beginning, but at this point my first thought was "I only have a month left here, should I get another cell phone?") One of my friends claimed not to have his, at which point the guy threatened to "blow his fucking head off" (or something similar), but he eventually backed off. He asked for digital cameras and US dollars as well, but none of us had either of those. Then, right before leaving, he pointed to my watch and demanded that too (it looks nice, but it's metal painted gold and i got it at costco, so i hope he is very disappointed). Lastly, he told us to wait in the park and not try and leave immediately. Within about a minute, he and his friend were on a bus headed away from the park.
After sitting for a few minutes and letting everything sink in, we made our way back to my apartment (about 4 blocks away) to talk to my host mom and see if there was anything we should do. The police were obviously not going to be able to recover anything for us or catch this guy, and filing a police report would have meant spending the rest of the day at a police station and probably paying a fee, so we opted to finish the mate on my balcony instead.
I'm actually surprised it took 4 months for this to happen, and the fact that I was expecting something along these lines and that we had gone over how to handle this type of situation during our orientation kept me pretty calm. It was pretty obvious that all this guy wanted was our money and what he could sell. He didn't want to make a scene and didn't take our bags or push harder (which might be why one of my friends got away with his cell phone intact and the other had his ipod in his bag). As far as muggings go, I'd this wasn't too traumatic.
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