On my way from Como to Rome in September of 1979, I had to change trains in Milan. From riding the New York City subway in the early 1970s, I believed I had developed radar that gave me excellent intuition about what felt safe. The Milan train station did not feel safe. I left the station, hoping that the streets outside it would be better, but turned on my heels and went back in when I saw the neighborhood outside the station. I walked around and around the station until my train arrived, since I didn't feel safe sitting in the waiting room.
The train broke down at a city somewhere between Milan and Rome. I got on line at the information booth to ask about the next train to Rome. But it wasn't really a line. It was more like a mass of aggressive Italian men who pushed ahead of me with sharp elbows. Any aggressive New York City tactics I had learned growing up were no match for this crowd. After half an hour I realized that rather than getting closer to the front of the line, I was getting farther and farther away.
A voice behind me said in a very proper English accent, "They don't know how to form a proper queue, do they?" It felt like a breath of fresh air in the cloud of Italian cigarette smoke. I started looking forward to my upcoming year in Cambridge. I turned and saw a gentleman standing behind me who looked like an officer right out of a film about the British Raj.
At a hostel I stayed at in Rome, some Italian girls told the rest of us that Italian girls and young women don't leave home without an older relative to protect them from being molested by men on the street. A young English woman claimed that, although she had once slept alone all night outside the Milan railway station, she would not be willing to walk down a street in Paris without a man by her side, because so many young women disappear in Paris's "white slave trade". I laughed to myself, and assumed she was a conspiracy theorist.
One of my more unpleasant experiences in Rome was when I walked down a sidewalk and a young man who was walking towards me reached out, grabbed my rear end, and squeezed hard, without breaking stride. In shock, I continued to walk on for a few seconds, before I stopped and turned. I was enraged, and was angry at myself for not immediately lashing out and hitting him. Then I realized that being frozen in shock was a defense mechanism that might have saved my life --- hitting him could have provoked him to attack me much more violently.
To make matters worse, this was the night that France turned its clocks back an hour. To agree with the schedule, my train waited for an hour on the tracks in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere, prolonging the torture.
I wondered what they did in the spring when the clocks were set forward.
Needless to say, I didn't get much sleep.
I considered going straight on to London from Paris, but that would be another overnight train, and I wasn't ready for that. So I left my luggage at the station, took the Métro to the Arc de Triomphe, and walked down the Champs-Élysées to the Tuileries, a beautiful and peaceful walk in the early morning hours.
While I waited outside the Jeu de Paumes for the museum to open, a student from Oregon who was spending the upcoming academic year in Paris on a junior year abroad program started chatting with me. She seemed quite sweet, just off the farm. She offered me an extra bed in the apartment of the wealthy woman who was giving her a room during her stay in Paris. Thinking back to the kind family in Cambridge, I accepted, and we spent the day together.
At a lunch café, I realized that my new friend wasn't the innocent just-off-the-farm girl I had taken her for. She told me about her new shady boyfriend, who was 10 years older than us. She wanted to involve me in some questionable dealings of his. Perhaps my danger radar hadn't been as good as I thought.
Having had no sleep the night before, my thoughts ran wild. I remembered the English woman in Rome who warned me about Paris's "white slave trade". Perhaps it wasn't just a conspiracy theory after all.
If I disappeared in Paris, could my family and friends find me? After Heidelberg, the only communication I attempted to have with them was a postcard I wrote to my parents from Rome. Not knowing what Italian mailboxes looked like, I couldn't be sure that I had placed it in a mailbox rather than a trash can. (Indeed, the postcard never arrived.) They would have no idea I was in France.
Even thought I was about to go to England and didn't need any French money, I decided to cash a traveler's check, just so that my parents might have some hope of tracing me if I vanished. My new friend, who until then had acted sweet and kind, was suddenly annoyed with having to wait with me in line for currency exchange at the train station. Her unusual reaction got me even more worried.
Although I wondered if I should stay vigilant overnight at the apartment, I was so exhausted that I eventually fell fast asleep ... only to be woken up in the middle of the night by my Oregon friend's roommate, who came home unexpectedly and wasn't happy to find me in her bed.
Of course, I wasn't sold into the white slave trade. Looking back on it, it seems funny that I was worried.
I made it safely to England, where the Cambridge police confiscated my passport because when I left the UK for the Continent in early August the stamp I got at Dover said I could stay in the UK for 12 months, but didn't say when the 12 months began. The police sent my passport back to Dover to get it stamped correctly.