Sunday, October 30, 2011

The Revenge of Cheese Thief



Oh la vache! This week has been hellish to say the least.  It was supposed to be my ten day vacation (that I really needed after a whopping three weeks of work) and laundry and blogging were on my mind.  Alas, all of my valiant attempts to blog about a lot of the nice but slightly boring things about life in Amiens were totally eclipsed by the return of our Camembert eating arch-nemesis, aptly named for this blog “The Cheese Thief.”  Don’t be too overwhelmed with my creativity; it’s a gift I cannot control.

So let’s back it up to Saturday night of last weekend.  My awesomely rad friend Jessica was in town to visit.  We have lived in France before together so we were giddy to catch up and French it out together, American style.  I picked her up at the train station, at some kebabs and reminisced, then returned to chez moi to hang out with the roommates and eat (again).  It was loads of fun!  Jose, another Spanish assistant from Guatemala, came too and we all ate some delicious potatoes and some chicken that totally rocked my socks off.  It could have been because I haven’t eaten chicken in awhile, but it was freaking awesome.  I made some sort of whipped up vegetable mélange because me and Jessica sort of invited ourselves to this dinner and I/we needed to contribute.  It was loverly.

Jessica was trying to get to Amsterdam to NOT partake of particular substances that are legal there, but to see the Anne Frank house.  She was going to go a la hitchhiking (with the help of a website that helps you find a ride to your destination) and staying with couchsurfer hosts, so she needed a moment with my computer to organize everything.  I bid her adieu for the evening and promptly began to pass out.  

I was in my room for about fifteen minutes or so, quietly making my way to the land of nod, when their was an ear-piercing scream from across the hall in the room Jessica was staying in.  My roommates and I have been totally creeped out by our dorm apartment and have thought that it might just be haunted for how ill at east we all of been since we got here.  So, that’s immediately what I thought.  Fucking ghosts.

Jessica bounded into my room and jumped on my bed and I basically caught her in a hug.  Confused and half awake, I asked her what was wrong.  She exclaimed, “There were two guys who came up to the window!  They were looking in and knocked on my window!”  Our dorm is kind of crappy and only select rooms have curtains, Jessica’s not being one of them because no one regularly lives in there.  Our apartment is also on the first floor, so anyone walking by can look in.  However, to actually come up to the window and make a point of pestering the occupants?  That is unnerving and annoying.

Jessica was very upset.  She pulled one of the mattresses into my room and slept at the foot of my bed.  I wasn’t all that worried at first.  We’re on a high school campus, and yes it’s a holiday so most of the students aren’t presently on campus every night, but most of them live locally so I just figured it was someone just passing through looking for mischief to cause at their school.  Our school is also poorly secured on the weekends.  The arm is down at the gates on the weekends, but the actual gate remains open and there is no guard when they’re not children present, so it reasonably could have been some other unrelated young people who were traipsing through and saw the light on in Jessica’s room.  They had run away and weren’t a problem for the rest of the night.  Jessica left the day after next on Monday and I resumed my lazy vacation.  

Until Thursday.

Wednesday night started off pretty normal.  I ate some quinoa and drank some tea.  I surfed the internet for a few hours.  Ok, several hours.  At 1am on technically Thursday morning whilst surfing my little heart out, probably reading a cake blog or that one that has animals talking in all caps, there was a loud and violent bang on my window.  Shit. My blood ran cold.  These fuckers were back!  Now I was scared.  This was something that was planned.  There was no way that in such a short period of time that two different groups of douchebag guys decided that our apartment needed pestering.  I got up and got Gwenola and Marilyn. As we were standing in Marilyn’s room (she took a bit more rousing to get up since she didn’t feel well) there were several more bangs on her window.  These weren’t knocks either.  They were loud and violent bangs that made the glass shake.

We were not playing now.  There was something going on and it was very intentional to come and bother us in particular.  We called the neighbor on my phone.  I of course ran out of credit while we were leaving a voicemail.  Marilyn didn’t have any credit and my American phone that has an “Emergency Call” number didn’t recognize an international emergency number.  Luckily Gwenola had her German phone, but she had the same problem trying to phone the police directly.  We did have the number of another woman that lived on campus (lots of the faculty actually live here).  She called the police for us and all we had to do was wait.

When everyone was up we did a sweep of the apartment to make sure everything was closed and locked up tight.  We turned off all of the lights so we could see outside. Gwenola and I stood in the doorway of the kitchen (which faces the parking lot and is the front of the building) watching to see if we saw anything.  Sure enough, two shadows emerged from the wooded area on the other side of the parking lot.  They didn’t directly cross the parking lot either.  They walked all the way to the edge of the building and crept up against the wall.  This did not feel just like normal stupid kid pestering to get a rise out of someone.  They seemed to have a plan.

We watched them do this and we waited.  We then watched as this dude’s fucking face appeared in the corner of our window. We both screamed.  We called the lady back to report that they were still menacing us.  She was still waiting on the cops.  We sat in our hallway where they couldn’t see us and listened to them continue to bang on our windows.  

Nearly an hour goes by after we first called the lady who called the cops.  Finally we saw some lights.  There was a car driving around, but no cops had come by yet.  We called the lady again.  She said that they were here but that she was trying to get them to leave their car and look.  What?  Excuse me?  We have some dudes harassing us and trying to break our windows and they don’t even want to get out of their cars?  To look for them?  To check on us?  To get our story?  Nothing?

The lady does eventually convince the cops that they should probably give the place a once over.  We see lights again and instead of them being headlights it’s the cops, the woman, and the woman’s daughter checking the property.  They stopped by our window and talked to us.  Again they were not helpful.  They basically told us that they had looked around and didn’t see anyone and that we were being overreacting dumb girls.  Oh goody.  I’m glad that sexist stereotype exists here too.  We told them that the banging stopped barely ten minutes ago and that we were sure that they were still here. Gwenola was pissed that they were being total tools.  She muttered under her breath “Of course.  It’s France.”  The policeman heard this and was not pleased and told her she couldn’t say stuff like that because she’s not French.  (Which she totally is- dual German/French citizenship!)

Anyways, I am now worried that they are going to do an even shittier job of looking for the guys since they now feel insulted.  I write a frantic email to all of my teachers asking for a place to stay for the following night(s) until I can find somewhere else to live because I am totally over living here.  I felt uneasy before there were dudes harassing us!

The lady then calls us back and says that they found the guys right after they left us.  Wanna know how?  Not because of excellent detective work by our douchey police friends, no, the little girl saw them running off while the police were talking to the woman, again trying to get out of doing their job.  They caught one of them I am sure about this.  I have a conflicting story about the other one.  One teacher of mine told me that they caught the second on shortly after, but another teacher said that they only had one and that they could only hope that he would give up his accomplice. 

What do the cops do?  Come back and let us know what happened to the jerks?  Nope.  They just leave and we have to find out through several different sources about what happened.

So at first we thought that they were both arrested.  Then we were told that they were immediately let go.  Then I heard that it was only one guy they had.  Then I heard that we would be called in.  How?  The cops didn’t even talk to us.  We went to the school and gave our statements to the principal.  He gave us some more keys so we could go through the classroom on the other side of our foyer so that we could have a lit entrance.  They were making us go around to the back entrance that is pitch-black at night.  That’s it.  That is what was officially done in reference to us.  No statement given directly to the police and no line up to identify the trespassers.  

That day was spent with my favorite teacher, Christiane.  She is super funny and has been terribly nice to me since I got here.  Marilyn and I have lunch with her and she contacts some friends who may have know someone who has a room for me.  We also decide that we should go to the police ourselves and give official statement- which is exactly what we tried to do the following day.  Of course, we are thwarted again by our illustrious police department in Amiens.

Gwenola and I go on Friday to the police department.  Marilyn and Christiane were on an adventure of their own.  Marilyn turned out to be quite sick an ended up spending Thursday night in the hospital with a kidney infection and on Friday she was released and got her medication and set up a nurse to come to our place so she could administer the medicine since it’s by injection.  So this took all day and Lola and I were on our own.  We find what we think is the main police department, but it is not the branch (? I guess?) that takes statements or files complaints so we go down the road to the other one.  The guy at the front desk is nice enough, but totally does not want to deal with us.  He told us that since the school filed a complaint that nothing else needed to be done.  We tried to tell him that we wanted to, that no one had our information, that it would be hard to prosecute these guys without a testimony or a line up or something.  He read us what was down for that evening, which of course totally played down the situation.  The cops made it sound like they were just some guys who found an opportunity to be assholes and nothing about how we now thought it was the Cheese Thief and his revenge.  We tried to tell this to the desk guy who thought we were just upset about our stolen cheese.  “THAT IS NOT THE POINT. THE POINT IS THIS IS NOT THE FIRST TIME WE HAVE BEEN HARASSED,” Gwenola kept saying.  He finally begrudgingly took our story about the cheese and tacked it onto the file he had read us.  Yeah, thanks.  Now they think we care about our stolen Camembert.

We had more luck the following day when all three of us went back with a teacher.  The guy yesterday was super nice and did not fight us at all about making a formal complaint.  A nice lady cop came and took all of our statements individually and I was so PROUD that my French is good enough to make a statement about hooligans trying to break in.  Oh yeah, the day after the incident one of our neighbors saw them trying to get in our door.  Yeah we are totally being whiny babies about attempted breaking and entering.  Ugh.  Anyways, our complaints have been filed and they have our information (although not thanks to astute police work but civilian persistence) and we are supposed to go back sometime next week to look at pictures.  Whee! Justice! 

I am still moderately worried that they will come back and better prepared with more than a plan of just bang on the windows until we come out, especially since they barely held them at all after the arrest.  So, we are waiting.  In the meantime, we had the other American assistant, Mike, move in with us to be tall, male, and Midwestern-ly intimidating to any future assailants.  I am also still contemplating moving.  I like my roommates though and my dorm seems far less supernaturally scary in comparison to Cheese Thief & Co, so, I am just feeling out the situation still.


Framboise was scared too.  I was getting ready to put her out the window right before all of the shenanigans! 

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