Welcome back to Madrid

Living in Madrid makes one paranoid. Paranoid that someone will run off with your wallet, or slash your purse from the bottom, or distract you while their friend takes off with whatever you have on you.

I myself have been extremely "pendiente" of the fact that Madrid houses gazillions of professional purse snatchers, and have spent the past year convinced that I would not fall into the same "guiri" trap as my compatriots.

My first weekend back in Madrid proved that goal unachievable. While at a bar with my friend in the Antón Martín neighborhood, my purse was stolen, and everything in it. And the worst part wasn't that it got stolen. The worst part was the headache and paperwork that came next.

Things that got stolen:
1. NIE (residency card): I will not get a new one until oh maybe March which really helps since it is required by law that you carry ID and I don't like carrying my passport on me in case it gets stolen which would render me unidentifiable in the eyes of the law here
2. Keys: it cost me 39 euro to get three new keys made
3. Debit cards: they ran off with my debit cards and bought 200 euro worth of metro passes. In order to get new cards I visited my bank three times in three days.
4. My cell phone: cost me 39 euro to replace it, and 4 trips to the Vodafone store in 3 days because their system was "down".

I now have the "denuncia" from the police station which states that yes, Maya Sparks, guiri, did get her stuff stolen, and we put a huge stamp on it to prove that. Took me 2 trips to the Comisaría in 3 days to get all the paperwork done.

It was bound to happen though, everyone has a purse snatching story, and some much worse than mine. My roommate's cousin had her card duplicated and the password stolen, and had upwards of 5,000 euros charged to her credit card from various countries in Europe. Thieves caught the travel bug apparently. What they had done was during the middle of the night taken apart the ATM machine and put their own machine inside it which was able to copy the card while the card was inside the machine, then with a camera mounted above the ATM, they read the password as the person types it on the keypad. After she discovered her money was gone a few days later the bank said they could take no responsibility because the ATM was outside of the bank and therefore outside of its responsibility. Unbelievable.