I'd like to see a thread where people tell some funny stories or crazy adventures that have happened while living in a foreign country.
I'll start! This is the time when I was arrested for setting off a bomb in a hospital.
I was living in Prague during the late 1990's and was walking to work early one morning. I noticed a policeman standing by a phonebox who noticed me at the same time. Our eyes meet across the park and he quickly started walking my way. I quickly started walking even faster towards my work as I hadn't renewed my residency permit and wasn't legal to live and work there. He cugh up with me and asked me for my papers. I gave him a photocopy of my passport with an outdated photo of me wearing glasses. He got a bit animated and told me that I should follow him to the phonebox and sit down.
Even though I had lived there for a few yers, my knowledge of the diabolical Czech language was only basic. I was much more interested in drinking beer and seeing the sights than learning an endless amount of conjugations, so while the policeman was gamely trying to interrogate me about something, it wasn't going well. Luckily a friend from work stopped by and offered to translate and help me out since he saw me surrounded by a growing number of nervous policemen.
It turned out that someone had actually placed a bomb in a nearby hospital waiting room to clebrate joining NATO and it had gone off and injured some people. The bomber had phoned in a bomb threat from this very phone box, and I was the chief suspect. My only defense was that the bomber made the bomb threat in perfect Czech. The police were hoping that I actually did speak Czech and kept standing behind me and saying things in Czech or walking up and casually saying things to see if I understood. Finally, they called the person who had recieved the bomb threat using the same pay phone and pushed me towards the phone box with instructions to talk on the phone so the person could compare voices. I was only capable of doing one thing on the phone in Czech, and I was well practiced, so I simply asked for a resteraunt reservation at 8 oclock that night. It worked like a charm, and it was soon obvious to everyone that I wasn't making any bomb threats.
The police collected all my details and made me set up an appointment later in the week to go to the police station. Keep in mind that this was an actual bomb that had blown up actual people, so I had to go to the federal police, the most serious guys. Being young and stupid, I just breeze in there with no lawyer, not even speaking the language, barely telling anybody where I was going. I as pretty sure that the police must be sure by then that it wasn't me, but I was too stupid to think of how badly it could all go wrong.
I walked in and was met by a very senior policeman. He told me that they did indeed know I hadn't done it, but since I was in the area maybe I could help identify the bomber. A witness had seen the person who made the call and described them to a police artist and they had a photofit of the bomber. The policeman put the picture down, and it was an exact likeness of me! I tried not to laugh and told the cop I'd never seen him before in my life. They let me go and I never heard anything more about it.
Strangely enough, the cops never gave me any grief about not being legal to live and work there. They must have known but I guess it wasn't a priority. In between the time I was questioned and the time I went to the police station, I'm fairly certain that some guys were following me around. Back in communist times, there were plenty of undercover police to follow dissidents around and Havel still had a bunch who kept an eye on him even after he was President becuase they never fire anybody. I must have been the easiest assignment ever as I spent most of my time drinking beer.
That's my story - let's hear some more...
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk