Nice Ville SNCF, 15:00
Waiting on the steps outside Nice station, we watched the world go by.
Fresh from England, our eyes saw the French as slim, small, dark and neat. There were few fat people. We were tourists, foreigners, just sitting in the sun. No-one noticed us.
A young man, in his late teens, waited near us. He had a small rucksack and a plastic cage with a young kitten in it. He took the kitten out, attached a short lead to it, and let it play beneath the palm-tree above them. An old lady nearby chatted to him, disarmed by the aura of gentleness that the kitten gave the lad. She left to catch her train or to meet someone.
After a while, two more men arrived to meet him, zinging in on a shared moped. They greeted each other, talked, joked. Then two more young men arrived to sit on the station steps, between the first group and ourselves. These men were darker-skinned, also with small carriers or rucksacks. They were unknown to the first three, but had just chosen that place to sit and wait. Suddenly, a single innocuous youth waiting for friends had turned into a group of five young men just hanging around, and the police arrived. There were two booted uniformed officers from the PAF, standing aggressively close to the five men, demanding papers, searching their bags, emptying their pockets, phoning for confirmation of their identities. And still we were ignored, as we sat there, three meters from the action.
The police finished their searches, they sauntered off. The second pair of young men looked at each other, avoided the eyes of the first group, then also walked away. The two boys on the moped zipped away with the first lad's luggage, then after an interval one of them returned on his own to collect him and the kitten. We sat there, undisturbed.
Fresh from England, our eyes saw the French as slim, small, dark and neat. There were few fat people. We were tourists, foreigners, just sitting in the sun. No-one noticed us.
A young man, in his late teens, waited near us. He had a small rucksack and a plastic cage with a young kitten in it. He took the kitten out, attached a short lead to it, and let it play beneath the palm-tree above them. An old lady nearby chatted to him, disarmed by the aura of gentleness that the kitten gave the lad. She left to catch her train or to meet someone.
After a while, two more men arrived to meet him, zinging in on a shared moped. They greeted each other, talked, joked. Then two more young men arrived to sit on the station steps, between the first group and ourselves. These men were darker-skinned, also with small carriers or rucksacks. They were unknown to the first three, but had just chosen that place to sit and wait. Suddenly, a single innocuous youth waiting for friends had turned into a group of five young men just hanging around, and the police arrived. There were two booted uniformed officers from the PAF, standing aggressively close to the five men, demanding papers, searching their bags, emptying their pockets, phoning for confirmation of their identities. And still we were ignored, as we sat there, three meters from the action.
The police finished their searches, they sauntered off. The second pair of young men looked at each other, avoided the eyes of the first group, then also walked away. The two boys on the moped zipped away with the first lad's luggage, then after an interval one of them returned on his own to collect him and the kitten. We sat there, undisturbed.
posted by Moses at
9:12 pm
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