Before I went to France, many advised me to be careful, there’s pickpockets everywhere, don’t say yes to everything people says and never easily trust those sellers.
For people who never really went outside my own country, travelling, of course I took every advice seriously. After all, you didn’t want to risk it all. Cause I don’t have any money if I were to be pickpocket-ed!
So, I don’t put my wallet in the back pocket of my jeans, instead I put it in the inside pocket of my backpack, which I worn it in front. That’s how careful I was.
Just like any other narrative of my stories, I found that I learnt a lot more when I was in France. Just the way I interact with Allah.
We found out that the ticket machines for trains there were equally terrible to Malaysia’s. haha.
We need one to ride on, but there’s none that functioned. So, we gambled and hopped on the train, in which we decided that we will buy the tickets once we arrived to our destination. To our bad, the machine tickets is outside the gate, and we stucked there with no idea what to do.
We stayed there, blanked, for nearly 30 minutes before we decided the best thing to do is to ask local people to buy the tickets for us, so we could go out the gate. It’s risky and we were pretty doubtful. But we did it anyways.
We called one, mid-twenty, black French guy who was nice enough to help us. ( He asked us to jump over the gate, the Frenchs did it all time. But we refused, obviously. ) He did! we were so thankful we asked him to keep the change.
There were also many black French people around the Eiffel Tower, trying to sell souvenirs in which they carried with them and approached people and shouted “souvenirs!”. But I quite afraid to buy. These people are usually scammers in Malaysia. But my senior, Jalal told me that I should buy from them. We can bargained and they sell them quite cheap ( Jalal said, ” Alah, kalau bagi key-chain sebijik diam lah orang”) in which I regretted later cause I don’t even trying to look at them. haha.
Things I kept myself noted, never judge people. It’s okay to have some doubt, but never to ignore it in total. France, for some is overrated, but for me is a wonderful experience. The imperfections of one country is what worth treasuring. If you don’t, you wouldn’t love your country more 😉
naufal shahrir 
