Raph's Adventures

It was yet another dark and rainy day in Toulouse. Going back to Sweden for New Year’s eve reminded me how good we had it here. Mattias even confessed he could not handle the cold anymore, that despite being a Swede, he’d rather move away from his home country. It is pretty much what all the Swedes tell me... Strange that I am the only one who wanted to stay there...

620pm on a winter day, night had fallen an hour ago. Friday is Karaté day, and I was invited to a poker game afterwards. Olivier, one of my poker buddies and friend, offered to pick me up at the end of my class and drive  to the place the game was on. Being the cautious fox I am, I planned to drop my wallet and cell to the store he works in on my way to the dojo so I did not leave over 200e in my bag in the men’s room.

I put on hat and gloves and walked to take a Velouse (Toulouse rental bikes). I picked one up and rode to Olivier’s store. I opened the store’s door and called Olivier over:

“Hey, here is my cell and my...”

I searched my pockets, all of them. I searched my bag. My wallet was nowhere to be found. Could I have left it at home? Impossible. I had the clear memory of me holding it, looking for my Velouse card before realizing it was in my jeans pocket.

The hat covering my ears started to feel very unconfortable since I started to turn red and hot: I had lost/dropped my loaded wallet...

The course of actions from there was clear: I would not head directly to the dojo, knowing that I lost my money. My heart would not exactly feel like training and I would prefer to know that I did everything I could to retrieve what was once mine.

In a desperate race, I rushed back to the station where I picked up my bike. Fifteen minutes had passed between the time I started pedaling and the time I got back to my starting point.

Lying on the ground, in the middle of the Velouse station, my black wallet. I swept it up and checked inside. The money was still there...

How could that happen? How could no one notice a wallet on the ground for more than 15 minutes? If only I could tell the few people who probably saw it and did not bother to pick it up that it was holding more than 200e, I would love to stare at them in the eyes and... thank them very much!





There are so many different ways this story could have ended. I could have arrived 10 seconds too late and never have figured out exactly what had happened. It could have been during summer and daytime, or just not rained and there would have been no way the wallet stayed there for long unnoticed; but that is not the part where I could have done anything about it. The one thing that saved me (or saved my money), is that I wanted my money to be at a safe place. Had I wanted to leave my wallet in the men’s room, I would not have noticed it was missing until I leave the dojo and would have blamed some thief...

Being a cautious fox did save me a lot of money. For all the times it bothered people around me, for all the time I lost to check and re-check my stuff, for every time I’m worried for no reason; just for that one day, and helped by the elements, it was worth all the past trouble.

If you are wondering how the poker night went, what do you expect the answer to be? Even though I don’t think luck should be taken very seriously, I did feel extremely blessed to be able to feel the black leather of my wallet in my hands again, and could not possibly think the night could go badly for me. And it did not.

There would be so much to say about last summer... A month away from home, that's what I needed to get away from still and quiet Toulouse.

Yohan had been working for 7 months in La Reunion, a french Island not too far from Madagascar. People would describe it as a paradise, since it shelters so many natural wonders... Yohan would describe it as hell on earth. He liked all the natural stuff but as soon as there were actual, local people involved in any of his activities, he only had one wish: escape.

I thought I would use some time off to travel too and fly to Copenhagen and Manila to play in a couple of tournaments. Since Yohan needed some holidays and that he was to be back in time, I offered him to tag along. He accepted and we booked our trip: a return Toulouse-Copenhagen / and another return Copenhagen-Manila. 
 

In the meantime, since I had some time before the big trip, I went to visit Marzena in Poland for two weeks. I may have a lot of things to tell about my time in Krakow and Zakopane with my polish teacher... but I'll just keep that for another time!


Anyway, back to the main story. Since we had planned to go to Copenhagen from Toulouse with Yohan long before I had planned my trip to Poland, I decided to fly from Krakow to Denmark directly and therefore not use my first ticket.


I finally met Yohan in Copenhagen Airport. Rasmus and his flatmate picked us up and we headed to theirplace where we would be about 15 people crashing there for the week-end. I have rarely seen invaded fields feeling so welcoming and cozy. Rasmus and his two flatmates, kim and Michael were prepared for the onslaught and I have to admit that I would never have thought to be received that way. Those danish guys handled the situation great. Since we would need to crash somewhere on our way back from Manila before taking our flight home on the next day, they offered us shelter for that day again.



How do you get to hate the nicest guy even if he did nothing wrong?  


On the following Monday, we flew to the Philippines. At first I was sceptic about our trip,I did not know what to expect. I knew the country was poor and heard all kind of stories about it. But I was just blazed. Of course, you do not want to hang out in the poor districs because they are very very... very poor. I did not feel as oppressed by locals as I was in Thailand, where the fact that you are European makes you the target of every peddler and beggar in town.

We visited Bohol and Manila on the first week. We played in GP Manila on the week-end, and that was great too: both Yohan and I were happy about our finishes. On Sunday, the day before we left to Palawan and its white sand beaches, I received a text from Rasmus:

Rasmus: "When do you arrive in Copenhagen?"
I replied: "On Friday evening, 10pm"

10 minutes later:
Rasmus: "When do you arrive in Copenhagen?"

I chose not to reply to that one, since it was probably a bug.

5 Minutes later:
"When do you arrive in Copenhagen?"

I then decided to reply:
"Why is you phone sending me the same message over and over again?"

Rasmus: "It should not".

We spent our last 4 days in Palawan, on the most amazing spot of the planet: Coco Island. My first time scuba diving. My first night out... Snorkling. The whitest beach I had ever seen...
During these 4 days, my phone kept receiving messages:
"When do you arrive in Copenhagen?"
"It should not"

I received these two messages about a hundred times each. Everytime I received a message from Rasmus, I hated him a bit more. I use my phone as my watch and leave it on the whole time. Damn I was pissed everytime I received yet ANOTHER message from Rasmus. Nothing I could do. When I woke up in the morning, 12 unread messages, a mix of "When do you arrive in Copenhagen" and "It should not".

Yes RASMUS, I HATED YOU...SO MUCH!!! (I stopped receiving the messages when I got home...Lucky you!)

It was a quiet and usual day of May 2008, Greg and I had decided to go and play a few hands at the casino. Greg took his car and drove home to pick me up. After he left his place and by the time he reached my place, it started raining. From my apartment, it sounded like it was a lot of water falling from the sky. In the stairs on my way out, I realized it wasn’t rain, but hail... big actual ice cube!

I only had to walk 2 meters to get into Greg’s car but it was enough to end up soak wet. From there, we spent about 10 minutes in the car. I have never been in a country during wartime, but I’m pretty sure it would sound like this. The hail falling on the car sounded like gunfire.

When you play cards and games where randomness is involved, even though you try to keep your feet on earth as much as possible, you always become a bit superstitious. Sometimes you sense something and unconsciously you feel it is a sign of bad luck, a warning... and when you have had a bad poker night, you realize: “I knew I shouldn’t have gone! I was warned”!

What was this hail all about? Was it a sign of a “no-go” for that night? We were on our way and it would have been ridiculous to go back. The electrical installations of the casino being what they are –weak and flawed-, the lights there were down. The games were suspended and we did not feel like waiting hours for the lights to come back. If we weren’t sure how to understand the “warning”, it was sure then that we were NOT supposed to play on that night. So we headed back.

I understood a bit later what the signs were really about. They were not saying “don’t go play tonight”, they were saying “go home, your apartement is being flooded!”

Back home, I opened my door and noted that water was leaking from the roof. Ice was blocking the evacuation system and water had to go down somehow, so it decided to pass by my place...

It took Greg, Kik and my landlord about 3 hours to take care of the waters. While we were at it, it started raining again, and good thing that we were there to clean everything up, otherwise water would have totally destroyed my place and everything in it!

Signs mean what you want them to mean. In the car on the way back home from the casino, I really wondered what this could all be about. Just random facts? Could it be that electrical failure after the hail storm was meant to be?

I have been on the move since January, especially to places I had never been before, like Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and Vancouver Canada in February.

In March , I followed the course of the Danube, going from Vienna to Bratislava, then from Bratislava to Budapest. What I had seen of Eastern Europe was Warsaw and Krakow, but I wanted to discover more. I took a few days to discover the region, stayed in Vienna for a week-end, spent 24 hours in Slovakia, then 5 days in the hungarian capital where Nóra became my official hungarian teacher.

On the train back from Budapest to Vienna, a strange dude came to sit next to me. He looked sure a bit freaky but I tried not to pay too much attention to him. He was clearly appearing disoriented and started to talk to me. It was neither in German or English and I figured he was talking Hungarian. It took me a minute to understand what he wanted, and I understood he wanted to get to some place in Vienna and did not know how to reach it. He could only speak Hungarian and I had to try myself at it for the first time in a “field situation”. Sure my skills are limited in that language but my teacher would have been proud of me had she seen me trying to explain how to reach Südbahnhof from Westbahnhof (fact that I happened to know as I actually had to find it out the week before).  He totally understood what I told him, making me proud of my communication prowess and happy I could help someone.

At the airport in Vienna on the following morning, while waiting for the plane that would eventually take me back to France, this guy, looking just as creepy as the previously mentionned one came to me and started talking in yet another language, a language I did not have the chance to know: Russian. Again, that guy could not speak any language I could speak, but I managed to understand his problem. He was worried about the bag he had checked in to France and did not know when/how to retrieve it. Using basic sign language I told him he would retrieve it in Lyon, that he should not worry. “Spaciba”, he answered.

It’s strange to think that you can help people even if you don’t speak their language . That makes it extra frustrating when you spend so much time and effort trying to learn one language when you just need to use universal words and signs to make yourself understood in most situations.

But why did these people come to me? There were a lot of people in both situations they could have turned to, but both time, it’s me they chose. It is something I can not scientifically explain, but I believe we have some kind of aura around us at all times. You know, when things are not doing so great and you feel that everyone is turning his back at you? That you feel that your phone isn’t working because no one is returning your calls or messages? In the opposite case, when things are doing great, that you’re feeling happy, everyone wants a piece of you. That aura is responsible for that. You ain’t doing good? People will stay away from you. You’re doing great? People will trust you, will be attracted to you like to a magnet.

Maybe there is a way to manipulate that aura, make it look like you’re doing good when you are not so people will come to you anyway, to cheer you up...

Last August, at the airport in Toulouse on my way to New York, I met Mathieu, a friend of mine from university. We chatted for a minute before he mentioned that he had met Julian, 15 minutes before, as he was heading back to Guyane where he moved to two years ago. I ran to the check-in desk an caught him there. The three of us had not met in two years and a half, and we were there, altogether, at 6am at the airport, all waiting for our flights to take us to a different place.

I met Julian again last week, as he was visiting his parents for Christmas... and choosing all kind of stuff for his wedding next year (!). We discussed our latest meeting and the way it happened...

Jean-Claude Van Damme is a french-speaking belgian actor playing in karate movies that people tend to laugh about, especially when he talks about philosophy, and “life issues”. He often makes a fool of himself because the way he explains his theories is often clumsy. The topic he is often laughted at is “Awareness”. “People are not aware enough”, he says. People see the shallow part of the muscled actor and laugh about it. I see an interesting concept of life and interaction.