Improvised Bludgeons, Expired Condoms and the British Broadcasting Corporation - Notes from a Traveler

International alcoholics, take note - polite society would frown upon passing out with a bottle of whiskey within reach, and yet I can more than vouch for its efficacy as an improvised bludgeon…

If you find yourself coming-to in a foreign land hungover off a nasty drugging (whether unsolicited or self-administered) you likely will have lost items including but not limited to money, shoes, passports and visas.

As your local embassy will be of little use, I would personally recommend the lost art of pick-pocketing on public transit – namely, the tried and true “newspaper method” in which a carefully positioned paper (preferably The Sun or its local equivalent) obscures hands roving through your neighbors’ pockets and purses. 

I recently liberated (and later utilized) a book of matches, Kč 700, a piece of butterscotch hard candy and an expired condom from the coat of a vulgar Belgian on the tramvaj in Prague using this technique...

The personal ad columns have long since been a perverse frontier inhabited by those sad and lonely hearts who dare to dream. And yet, as I recently found after some measure of embarrassment, “BBC” as found in the personals does not stand for “British Broadcasting Corporation”...