May 1990

All the groups from the fourth grade of high school could choose to go on a theme week, that was related to one of the courses you followed for graduation.
I chose to go to Paris with my French class. We didn't have all such a busy program; visiting the standard touristic things, some museums and then ofcourse try to practise our French language. For this day we had a short program only in the morning and in the evening, the afternoon we could do whatever we wanted. It was late in the afternoon already and had been cruising around with one of my classmates. We'd been checking some things downtown and it was pretty much time to go to the place where we were supposed to gather. We hopped on the subway that took us towards the station close to Champs Elysées. We sat down comfortably, with our shoes on the seat opposite to us and just talked a bit.
It was quite a long trip and we stopped at several stations. At one station we saw two policemen standing, waiting for the doors to open. It wasn't really something special, there were policemen everywhere in Paris. Only these two policemen came into our compartment.
Still nothing to worry about. We did get tickets this time (it was so easy to get through in the subway without a ticket, but we happened to get tickets this time). We got a tiny bit nervous when they came walking straight at us and we looked at eachother, wondering what was going on. And in the mean time we took our shoes off the opposite bench.
And indeed, the two policemen were really coming for us. They summoned us to get up from the bench we sat on and now we were really wondering what the hell was going on.
One of them asked us if we spoke French. We did speak a little bit of French, but not all that well and they were talking way too fast to follow anyway, so we replied in English that we didn't speak French all that well.
We had to give our passports and show the ticket for the subway, but they didn't even care to look in them first. One of the policemen grabbed my classmate at the shoulder, the other one did the same with me and we were pushed against the wall of the subwaytrain. We looked at eachother again, but one of the policemen told us to face the wall and spread our legs.
We did so and we were frisked thoroughly, not in the most careful way. Ofcourse they didn't find anything, we didn't have anything on us but our passports and wallets and the tickets for the subway.
Then we could turn around again and we saw the policemen look in our passports. They returned them after awhile and didn't say anything except for that we weren't supposed to sit with our shoes on the bench.
By that time we ran into another station and they got off, leaving us there struck completely silent, not knowing what to do, not knowing what we did wrong. We refused to believe that we were treated like that, because we sat with our shoes on the bench.
We sat back down (not with our shoes on the bench this time), since we had still a couple of stations to go before our stop. We both were pretty shaky. It wasn't really something you encounter every day.
Later we found out that during one of those days there was going to be a soccer match between France and Scotland as one of the preliminary competitions for the European Championship.
Those policemen must've thought we were Scottish fans...