The 113th Episode : Something touched my bottom
[March, 1998 Barcelona, Spain]
The distributor meeting for 2 days was over. The dinner on the last day was taken each freely. The hotel for the meeting was located near the port of Barcelona. It is the port from where Christopher Columbus departed to discover America and there’s his memorial statue pointing the direction of the US.
There are an aquarium, a marine museum… where many people visit. Also many restaurants are opened. Their best bargains seemed to be seafood from the Mediterranean Sea, so they put a small aquarium at the entrance just like Japanese Sushi restaurants. A blue crab I saw, never seen before.
I was walking at where to eat, when some people of our distributors were at the outdoor table. They found me and invited, saying come on, come on. They might be already drunken, I felt. I joined. My friend in our subsidiary in the UK, the guys from Germany and Croatia… were there. As said before the Spanish dinner starts late, it was already 10:00 p.m.
Dinner was finished but still drinking. They were in high spirits. They wouldn't go back to the hotel directly, but began to walk to look for the next drinking place. There were so many people on the passage. Because it was the special day. The time system would be changed to summer time in a couple of hours later. Japan doesn’t have the custom. Shops were to attract customers with an elaborate plan.
At a bar a woman was dancing in a bikini on the stage by the entrance. We stood and watched her for a while. Then I felt something on the bottom. It was very crowded like a train in rush hour, so something touched when somebody walked behind. But it was different from that. Must be a pickpocket. I looked back, where a young guy was standing. ‘What’re ya doin’?’ I glared at him. ‘I’m just lookin’. He said, but he was obviously a suspicious behaviour.
The German distributor advised me ‘don’t put your wallet in your back pocket’. 'Don’t worry. It's in my waist porch here.' I showed him it was on my stomach. There were many pickpockets and luggage thefts in Spain. Take care!!
