One Night in Bogotá...

Bogotá, Colombia. 10 p.m. Having endured a three-hour Shabbat dinner during which my hosts repeatedly implied that my summer roommate was a bad Jew while pretending I didn’t exist, I left Chabad House thinking I had survived the most hostile encounter of my night. Ignoring the advice of our dinner companions and every other human we had met so far, we decided not to call a taxi and instead walked towards a nearby bar, hoping to unwind to the calming sounds of Daddy Yankee.

For the first eight blocks we commended ourselves on surviving both our dinner and our first week in Bogotá, despite my mother’s prediction that I wouldn’t make it past the airport without Pablo Escobar kidnapping me and demanding a ransom that she assured me she would not pay. So far, all seemed quiet on the kidnapping front. The rabbi, at least, seemed relieved to be rid of me.

As we were walking, we spotted the always-welcome figure of a hooded man walking out of a dark alley.

“Shit,” said my roommate, thoughtfully assessing the situation. I told him that he had read too many HUPD Community Advisories and laughed off his suggestion that we turn and run in the other direction. Bad things didn’t happen to me when I traveled. Sure, there was that time I almost inadvertently enlisted the services of a St. Lucian hooker. And that other time when an angry Czech masseuse ripped off my boxers after I failed to understand her Russian tirade. And maybe losing 50 pounds to a Guatemalan parasite wasn’t ideal, but I got to eat as many Big Macs as I wanted for five months. No, I told him, we did not need to run for our lives. Like I do with the Greenpeace volunteers in Harvard Square, I simply needed to politely decline the hooded figure’s request and go on my way.  I didn’t have five minutes to stop global warming, and I certainly didn’t have five minutes to get mugged.

Sadly, the man in the hoodie wasn’t on board with this plan. As I passed him, he grabbed the sleeve of my jacket, pulled out a knife, and said in a barely decipherable murmur, “Dame tu celular.” Like any non-freshman getting cold-called in section, my mind struggled to find the easiest way out of what was becoming my very first mugging. At this point, I would love to tell the story of how I used my enormous height advantage, the training acquired during my HUPD Rape Aggression Defense class, and the help of my valiant roommate to fight off my offender. But that would be a lie.

Instead, I raced to hand over my cell phone and cash while my roommate stood five feet away, doing nothing. It must’ve been the easiest 20,000 pesos that man had ever made. I’m not really sure how long this whole transaction took, but it was somewhere in the range of 60 seconds, and then it was done. I was mugged. I was stranded a hundred blocks from my apartment in a foreign city with nary a centavo. Would I have to become a drug mule and smuggle ten pounds of cocaine in my body in order to leave the country? Would the rabbi let me back into his house? The first seemed likelier.

To compensate for doing absolutely nothing during the actual mugging, my roommate did buy me lots of cervezas to lower my heart rate back to a healthy level. But even this normally foolproof tactic failed, and when we got back to our apartment (which thankfully had a bulletproof door), I still couldn’t sleep. The next day, I refused to leave the apartment. The day after, I ran out of a grocery store convinced that the 60-year-old grandmother who had been standing at the meat counter next to me was only biding her time before jumping me. For several weeks, my irrational paranoia led me to believe that any stranger within two miles of me was almost certainly a sociopath waiting to pilfer my vintage Nokia. For the rest of the summer, I only visited the ATM wearing running shoes so that I could sprint the three blocks back to my apartment. Logically, I knew that the odds of getting mugged again were about the same as going to Friday morning lecture, but I couldn’t shake this feeling that everyone around me was waiting to pounce, and not in the good way.

Giving someone your money because they are threatening to hurt you is no fun, and kind of expensive, and maybe I still get rattled when I see little old ladies standing too close to me. But in some ways, I’m glad the whole mugging thing happened. Going about my daily routine—Adams, Class, Lamont, Kong, Nausea, Adams—is nice. But every so often you need crazy experiences to liven things up a little, like drunkenly hailing a Boston cop car that had more than a passing resemblance to a taxi, or getting mugged in Colombia.

Maybe going into Boston or a different Chinese food restaurant would suffice, but for extreme guys like myself, sometimes you need a little international petty theft to mix things up. And the story makes a great pick-up line.

Peter W. Tilton ’10 is a History and Literature concentrator in Adams House. He is moving to Connecticut after graduation.