I’m glad nothing bad ended up happening to you. I read this story in Student Travels magazine about this girl traveling in Czechoslovakia who had dinner with a strange Italian couple, and the next thing she knew, she woke up in a ditch in the Bulgarian countryside! She was okay but all her stuff had been stolen. The cops thought the couple drugged her and took her over the border in the trunk of their car!

I once got into a weird situation with an Albanian I met on the metro in Washington, DC. I kept marking up some of the strangeness to his cultural background. We ended up having dinner and talking about the ‘mother country.’ He tried to recruit me into some kind of strange pro-Albanina political activity. I was young, and intrigued, and happy to meet the one person who cared that I’d been to that country.

But I should have ended things a whole lot sooner that day. I drank too much. Somehow, this led to dancing.

I’m too embarrassed to even write the rest. But I did, finally, get home with my honor (barely) intact.

So I think you did the right thing. It’s tempting to try to be ‘nice,’ but, as Nixon said, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.

In my case with the Albanian, I should have been more ‘paranoid’ at the outset….