Bicycle Thief

Living in Abu Dhabi, the first thing that people will tell you how safe it is here. Apart from the obvious danger of getting run down in the road by some maniac driving 100 miles an hour while sending a text message on his mobile phone, I would agree with that. Unfortunately, that feeling of safety can make a person complacent as I found out on Friday.

I went for a bike ride with my kids to a nearby park. For them the bike ride is the main part of things with the park just being a destination in mind. Usually we ride to the park, spend about 30 minutes there, and head back. We tend to go in the early afternoon, but got off to a later start so by the time we got to the park, it was pretty crowded.

After letting the kids play around for about 20 minutes, I decided that I'd had enough. When the kids went to get back on their bikes, we found that Tia's bike had been stolen. Even though I realized what had happened, something about seeing my daughter in tears over the loss of her beloved bicycle infuriated me.

Sure enough, after a ten or fifteen minute search of the park, I found the culprit: a girl about the same age as my daughter. As I suspected the girl has just taken the bike for a joyride with no ill intent. While I wasn't too hard on the girl, the sight of a man confronting her about the bike must've scared her plenty, because she ran away. After I thought about it, I felt bad. The poor girl was having a great time on this new toy without having understood that she did something she shouldn't have. Still, it was nice to be a hero in my daughter's eyes.