This is by far, the craziest, crappiest experience in Florence so far. You know how people always say that Arabs/Egyptians love each other in foreign countries?
WRONG! random Arabs in Europe are to be avoided at all times!
Why you ask?
Well, despite the random, rude comments I get every once in a while by Arabs, they get very excited when they know that you’re also an Arab or an Egyptian and not in the good, friendly way you would expect. It somehow intices them to become more annoying!
I’m not speaking about the decent ones who mind their own business, and I’m not trying to generalize, but I’ve seen too much which has led me to avoid any Arabic speaking person in the streets of Florence.
Let me tell you about my day..
It was the weekend, me and a few friends decided to go to this karaoke bar and have a good time. Everything went smoothly, later at night while I was going back home (with a female friend and a male friend). We encounter an Egyptian guy who heard me say something in Arabic, so he came to me and
asked me where I was from, I tried to be friendly by answering his question so we could just shake hands and go our own way.
But OF COURSE it didn’t stop there, he started asking me personal questions and asked me to leave my friends so he could walk me home, I politely said “no”, and “it was nice meeting you but I have to leave.”
He got angry, he got aggressive with me friends and that’s when I told myself “That’s it, screw being nice, I’m outta here.”
I take my friends and start walking for about 10 minutes, then we stop and have a random conversation with some Italians. Three minutes later, I find that Egyptian guy standing with us, all quiet and angry; I asked him “what do you want?” He didn’t answer, he just shouted at my guy friend because he had his arms around me.
I was like “What the helllll?” He then grabbed my friend by the arm and pushed him away. We were all so confused, the guy was so angry and aggressive, he kept shouting at everyone and pushing the guys, so normally, the guys started shouting back, not knowing what on earth was going on.
So the Egyptian guy took off his belt and literally started beating up anyone around him, we all walked away from him in different directions, but he chased us and made a phone call.
The next thing we saw was a group of Arabs with different accents holding broken beer bottles and walking towards us.
Of course, since I’m a badass and strong, the first thing I did was RUN! I kept running like a chicken with my 2 friends, then we got into a Turkish Kebab shop to hide there and owner knows us, and thought we were joking when we said an army of Arabs are following us here.
After hiding out for awhile, I thought “Hm, maybe they lost us, I should go out and see if there’s anyone following us.”
I went out and saw them standing there, waiting and kicking cars and side mirrors off, I ran inside again and waited as they made a scene outside. No one understood what was going on, no one called the police and it was 4 AM.
After sometime, I peaked outside to find the Egyptian guy far away, giving me his back, so I pulled my friends and started running like my life depended on it, I don’t think I ever ran that fast before in my life.
Anyway, we got home safely, we were in shock, it felt like we were in a dream.
Why did the guy do that? What did he want? What was he going to do if he actually got to us?
I don’t know.
All I know is, I will never risk putting myself in a situation like this because I have “faith” in Arabs or Egyptians in Europe, I learned the hard way.