If I Go Alone, the Cannibals Will Eat Me

            “Wow! You’re doing all this Alone?”  She said flipping through my calendar for the next year, full of plane flights and hostel bookings.

            “Yep! I’m so excited!  I mean not everything is in place yet I mean you can see there are a few gaps here where I haven’t decided what I’m doing yet, but I have a few months still.”  I beamed showing off my life dream planned out, booked, and ready to be achieved.

            “Oh girl, you’re gonna die in human trafficking or something!” My friend laughed at me.
            “Yeah, but it will totally be worth it.”  I smiled.

            “Everyone has to die somehow; I guess it just wouldn’t be my choice of how I want to go.”  She said shaking her head.

            While she was laughing, I knew a part of her was serious.  My dream of going off and traveling was her nightmare.  Sure she wanted to go cool places, and do fun things, and take pictures in front of the Eiffel tower, but she wanted to it all from the safety and security of a travel group full of people she knew and trusted.

            She isn’t the only one who is shocked to hear of my after college plans, most of the time when I told people, although their said it was cool and they were jealous, their faces were afraid.  At some point they would work in “be sure to see Taken and Hostel before you go and be safe!” somewhere into the conversation.  The funny thing is I wasn’t going anywhere too intense; I was backpacking across Europe and Australia.  These weren’t war-torn countries where bullets would be flying down the streets on a daily basis.  They were just normal countries which held no more threating than staying at home.  Whenever the movies Taken and Hostel are brought up, I like to ask them if they have ever seen Glass House or Prom Night plenty of us girls have seen those and we still went to high school and  to prom and to babysit our parent’s friends children when we still weren’t even legal adults yet.

I admit, taken is probably the most realistic of all these movies as for something that could actually happen to a girl abroad, but lucky for us, they kept it honest, and you can see even in that movie the exact moment where Kim and Amanda make their fatal mistake.  No, it wasn’t in decided to stay in Paris alone, nor was it when they blared the music too loud for their neighbors to hear them scream.  Their fatal moment came at the very beginning where they met the seemingly harmless Peter in the airport.  No, it wasn’t the actual meeting of the boy that did them in, it was the way in which they met him.  They never asked him about his own life.  They let him question them without questioning what he told them at all.  They didn’t ask him where he was coming from, where he was going, why he was hanging out in an airport, where his bags were, or any evidence for his answers.  They gave out all their own personal details.  If they had asked for something or anything at all, they probably would have felt that creepy vibe people give off when their stories don’t add up and probably would have gotten in the Taxi alone and continued on their adventure touring the concerts of Europe.  Oh look fatal mistake number 2 they shared a Taxi with a guy and were dropped off first at the exact spot where they were staying.  Sharing a ride with someone you don’t know should make your nervous bells go off. 

Really girls you couldn’t have splurged for the extra five bucks to not split the cab fare, those girls were just too poor? Of course the bus wasn’t an option, because there isn’t a single bus that goes into Paris from Charles de Gaulle Airport!  Besides, how could they be rude to their new friend they just made in a city where they knew no one?  Ok so split the cab girls, but don’t let his French “politeness” fool you, tell him that you want to see the city a bit and would prefer HE be dropped off first, or be dropped off a couple blocks away, walking a bit won’t kill you, but he could.  In the grand scheme of things, five bucks really isn’t all that much, every airport I have ever been too, including the Roanoke airport, where you get the awesome experience of walking out onto the tarmac every time, has buses going to just about every place you could want to go, and being rude is always ok if your safety is in question people are everywhere losing out on one guy who couldn’t respect your safety is not going to matter in about fifteen minutes.  I can pretty much guarantee that you will never look back and think “hmmm, why was I so rude to that prick who wanted to rape me in the middle of the night?”  You’re just not!  There are plenty of people in this world, most of whom aren’t sketchy, so go ahead and feel people out and drop the ones that raise some red flags for you.

My friend Sandy actually had some guys try to pick her up in a similar way, she had gone to Las Vegas alone while visiting the U.S. from Australia, but was flying in from Orlando.  She was waiting at the taxi line when two guys came up to her and said “Hey mate, you Aussie?”

“Yep” She replied smiling. 

“So are we!  Nice to see a people from home on the other side of the world; wanna come out with us later tonight.”

“No, I’m meeting up with my boyfriend.”  She countered.  She could already hear flaws in their accent, and just had an off feeling about them.  She knew perfectly well that no boyfriend was going to meet her here.  She would venture the sites and shows alone. 

“We should split a cab, I mean Vegas is all in the same direction.”  The boys said to her, making no offer to include her boyfriend in their “awesome” adventures.  She laughed turning away to approach the cab caller when suddenly another guy grabbed.

“Take my cab!” The stranger said, “Those guys aren’t from your country and they aren’t safe.  You need to keep a sharp eye out here.”

“Thank you so much and believe me I knew, they weren’t Australian on the plane” She winked getting into the cab thankful to the kind stranger.

This is how that scene from Taken would actually go down if you are smart about it.  First of all, Sandy let her conversation and body language signal to others that she did not know these guys.  She also wasn’t about to step foot in the same cab as them or let them put her in an uncomfortable situation.  Lucky for her, someone picked up on her signals and pulled her out before she had to make a stand on her own.