03 The photos, the little shooting and the shouting.

Spring and summer 2001.

These events all took place between the writing of the Provocative pages and 11 September. All in all they were odd things to happen to me, it was clear that there 'something' was going on. But what? I just did not understand it, may be I was to stupid or may be I should have taken classes into the Arabic ways of speaking...

Lets stick to the facts, as always only the simple facts count:

In my car I was waiting before a traffic light on the Ringway (a set of highways surrounding Groningen). Behind me an elderly man pushed the claxon and I looked in the mirror to see what was going on. The man sees I am looking at him and he makes gestures like he is making a photograph and he points to a car further down the row of cars to my left.

And I was totally flabbergasted, why should anyone want to make a pic of me or my car? Was this the so called 'social cops' (because I was having a small unemployed benefit while I still had my little business in private teaching of math and statistics). But those social detectives could not make a case against me, I did nothing illegal. When you have a small business it is not needed to do illegal stuff, the Dutch tax institutions are generous for you. 

So flabbergasted I was, but what to do? Get out of the car and take a look who was making photographs of me? Right now I just wished I would have done this, but the light jumped to green and I was only thinking 'Nobody can do anything to me, with or without photos' so I just drove away.

But right now I still do not know who was making those photos, so if you as a reader knows more about this... Please let me know, please let me know. (You can email to reinko1963@hotmail.com ). 

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The second thing that was a bit strange was the following; I was at a so called bazar (that is when shops are allowed to put some of the selling stuff outside in a desperate attempt to make a cozy impression). It was very very quiet at the bazar, only a very few elderly walked around.

Suddenly I did get a (air pressure) shot on the lower side of my right leg. It could only come from the houses above (there was a flat above). And carefully so carefully I tried to see who did this shot at me. But the shooter probably knew the rules and he (or she) did not make a move so I could not see where it came from. I kept on looking for about one or two minutes and gave up.

All in all nothing really serious, but strange because it was so very quiet at the moment of the shot. So very quiet and this did not look like some teenager trying to do something.
It was long time ago since I was shot for the last time, over twenty years (when I was a teenager myself it happened a few times before but always it was not serious). Again I was puzzled, why such a strange and clean shot?  

And then we had that strange shouting. Also this was a new experience to me; it happened about five times and in between were often a couple of weeks.
Those 'shoutings' had more or less the same pattern in it, I was only doing stuff like rollerblading (skeelering) and a car came along. The car stops or decreases speed, the window is turned open and after this 'something' was shouted at me.

What it was is still unknown to me (it was always in Arabic, I could not understand what it said). But from the tone you could hear it was not meant in a friendly way, those guys were very mad at me. And why? Why? I only became more puzzled from this. Only more puzzled.

Again this is almost 'nothing' but it was just different from the way people normally react to me. Please do not think those people shouted because they had lack of driving space or so, no it were broad roads. The drivers recognized me and stopped or started driving slowly. And then they shouted, but to my feeling there was completely no reason to shout. Needless to say; after 11 September this stopped 'suddenly'.

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