Don’t Let Them Steal From You

Safety in travel keeps coming up a lot. To be honest, it’s something about the narrative around travel that’s bothered me for as long as I’ve been living in Paris. Big or small, whenever there’s something remotely dramatic going on in the City of Light, I tend to hear about it first from friends or family in the US.

The media loves picking up anything that mars the myth of a pristine Paris and running with it. The story that always comes to mind for the sheer volume of “TERRORISTS IN PARIS?!” texts I got before I even heard the sirens (I was only a few blocks from the incident in question, near Notre-Dame), was that guy that hit a cop with a hammer. As I recall, everyone was fine. Hammer guy needed the most help in the end, I’m sure.

To be clear, safety is important. Knowing that you’re going to be okay when visiting a foreign country is a valid priority when you’re away from your support network and immersed in a language you don’t speak. Which is why I think it’s so frustrating when the genuinely bad gets magnified into something fictitiously catastrophic.

It’s important to highlight reality in the service of helping others navigate the city - which is why I finally did make a video on pickpockets and scams in Paris. But I hesitated for years because of all the xenophobic, racist, and misinformed comments it would generate. Ultimately, I figure that if I can save a few people from getting scammed or help a few avoid some pickpockets along the way, it’s worth wading through some of the less savory responses.

But those responses are often also driven by the social media posts and news feeds that would have them believe Paris is constantly burning (from a tobacco leaf’s perspective, I can see a valid point of concern here). And what this does, largely in service of driving clicks and their sweet sweet ad revenue, is rob so many people of the joy of travel.

I’m comfortable traveling in most places. I lived in port cities in some of the poorest countries on Earth for years, saw the inside of a Congolese prison, and have had my fair share of… let’s say… opportunities to learn on the fly how to handle stressful life-or-death situations. So I’m a bit less sensitive to pickpockets and clipboard scammers than most. But I wasn’t born that way. I had to learn through experience. And more often than not, I had some good people around to show me how to make it through.

Not that I’m advocating going quite as far as I have on the experience front.

But when people are too scared to give Versailles a stroll, they don’t have a chance to see just how safe it really is. How the greatest threat is that of having strangers rub sweaty arms against them. They miss out on having some near misses with train schedules, waiters who try to sneak an extra glass of wine on their bill, or run-ins with grumpy ticket checkers in the metro.

In short, they miss out on the discomfort, stress, and challenge of early travel experiences. And thus, they miss out on seeing just how capable they are of handling all of it. Psyching people out of stepping out their front door and seeing where the world will carry them robs them of an opportunity to get to know themselves. It steals their chance at growth, satisfaction, and a joy that comes with diving into new cultures and sharing a bit of their own along the way.

Don’t let anyone steal that joy from you. Do your research, learn everything you need to in order to feel ready to go, but then take the risk. Nothing prepares you for the journey but the journey itself. What you’ll get in return is something no one will ever be able to take away.

Jay