D28 Whatulookinat?

1/9 Cloudy, foggy
Istanbul, Budapest

After the Lyon inccident, I always stay in high cautious when I walked alone on the street or after the sunset. I don’t feel like to face that kind of situation again in my life ever! Right now I carry a knife with me in any cases. But sometimes I got frightened when somebody closes to me, maybe just ask me to take photos for them, maybe ask for time or even ask for direction. Especially when teenager guys stronger than me, I felt like they might be a potential threat.

But things is not as well as I expect. You know, during the journey, I always try to keep the good memories.

I had to catch a morning flight from Istanbul to Budapest, which means I had to get out of house before the sunrise. It was still dark at 7am, I grabbed my luggage and went to the Taxi station, asked the driver took me to the bus station. Deniz told me the taxi fee would be 5 to 7 liras, and I had only 20 liras in my wallet, nothing more.(The bus ticket is 13 lira) The damn taxi driver took some loop to somewhere I don’t really know, then I had to pay 9 liras for taxi fee.

I realized that I am running out of liras, I couldnt even take the bus. So I had to withdraw money in ATM machine. The bus was 7:30, after I put my luggage in the storage was 7:20, I got 10 minutes left to the bank. It was like 200 meters away.

Anyhow, I need to catch my flight, so that I took my wallet with me, went for the ATM. When I almost done with the withdrawing, there were 2 guys seemed like drunk, looked at me with greedy eyes. I knew something might happened, so tried not to have eye contact with him.

But the guys kept looked at me with strange face expression, I was nervous, but pretend that I am Okay. I gave them a gaze and then kept waiting for the bill. The guys passed me but one of them tried to walk back, and he kept looking my wallet. Then there were the other guys and girls walked in the opposite direction, so he gave up. I knew that he tried to robbed my wallet, I got only 10 liras and a few coins inside, almost nothing left to lose, I could fight with him, but I needed to catch my bus desperately!

Finally nothing happened. I made it to catch the flight. Great! I thought that I could have something good in Budapest!

It wasn’t the best when I first talked to the people here. The custom officer checked my passport for 10 minutes, then asked me to take a seat.

the bronze officer

I knew anything might happened when the custom officer asked you to take a seat. I waited for 20 minutes and then he came to me,

We need to check out your passport, because I don’t know what’s that sticker for.

It was the OFII sticker made the custom became suspicious about me. The officers gathered together and discussed about my visa for 10 minutes. I prepared a voice recorder in my pocket, just in case. So I recorded everything they said.

The result went out to be alright, I could travel back to European Union again! But this situation made me rethink my ability to deal with crisis. I always think of the worst situation, like at least I can buy an expensive ticket to France, re-enter European Union country again. I never expect this stuff could happen to me, actually nobody did. I claimed that I have the resident right to live in France, in the name of the little yellow sticker.

9 of January, the 29th day of my travel, bad things happened, please never make it happen again!