hmmm,a couple of stories I won’t tell 'cause I’m not sure about the statute of limitations for those countries. However, the worst I had was flying into Orlando. It was a direct flight from Tokyo that started in Shanghai. It was freaking long and before the days I took ambien to turn a 16 hour flight into a 2 hour book read. Anyhoo, I finally get into Orlando. Get my bags and go through customs.
For some reason, I get pulled for an agricultural/bag check. I’m frazzled, smelly, dressed like a middle aged businessman. I get the third degree about 5 times. Do you have anything to declare? Are you bringing in any agricultural products? Did you forget an apple in your luggage?
I keep saying "I’m tired, been up forever since Shanghai, been through this routine dozens of times and left everything potentially in violation behind before I even packed up. No, I don’t want to change my declaration.
After the 5th warning, they ran my stuff through xray and found sweet fuck all. I asked a couple of times, what was the trigger so I make sure I avoid THAT next time as well.
dickwads didn’t say jack. Not even apologize for taking their sweet fucking time going through the process. I hate Orlando on many levels, but it started at customs.
Personally my trips through customs have been pretty easy…especially US to Canada. Inside the US I once got called aside to talk to nice Mr TSA agent about why my checked bag tested positive for explosives.
Coming back from Cabo, they did a full search of our luggage at customs. We had carried a few…adult items with us. (paddle, dildo and a couple other small things) The guard gave us a ‘what the fuck’ look. My husband looked him right in the eye and said, ‘you go through our things, you find what you find.’
My MIL was coming back from Mexico with my husband and his brother, years ago. They were still teens, living at home. She should have known that you can’t bring a large bag of mangos in, but she forgot. So she had picked up a giant bag of mangos and tried to bring it across.
The agents told her to toss 'em. She said oh no, “I’m going to eat them all.” So she sat there, in one of the inspection bays you can pull the cars into at the border crossings, and ate 25 mangos or something. My DH and BIL laughed their asses off. The collective border patrol was also amused. I think it took her a good while. She just would not waste food. Considering it was Texas in the Summer, I would not have been amused, but it’s family lore now.
My only interesting time was when I was made to throw away not just my nail varnish but my asthma inhalers. This was on the way from London to Rome, and (at the time, at least) you weren’t supposed to need to carry a prescription for them and you had to carry them in carry-on luggage; this I knew from checking both before and after the flight. Fortunately I had friends there who helped me get to a chemist and buy replacement inhalers (at reasonable rates, after a long discussion in broken, wheezy Italian) as soon as I landed.
But the bastards took the medication that quite literally keeps me alive. I’ve tried going without it temporarily before, just to see if I can, and I can’t.
OTOH, travelling as a disabled person with “special assistance” helping me through the airport has allowed me to see behind the scenes a lot and has also allowed me to take a bottle of water, an apple and a sandwich (on different occasions) through. They also very thoroughly check my (airport) wheelchair and occasionally ask me to take off my shoes, which I really can’t do from a wheelchair, so one time they just waved me through and another time they knelt down and removed them for me while constantly looking up to check if I was OK, which looked really odd, like they were my servant. They also thoroughly check me if I’m wearing a sling, but that’s understandable.
Many years ago I visited the Chelsea Flower Show in England, and bought a few packets of flower seeds to take home. One of them was a variety of ornamental poppy (Papaver somniferum, of which the most famous example is the opium poppy). I didn’t know if importing the seeds of a garden variety was permissible and didn’t feel like answering questions about it, so I mixed in those seeds with those of another, differently labeled packet.
Back in the U.S., a customs agent showed no interest whatsoever in my telltale seed packet, but was curious about another, completely innocent one.
There was one time when my wife and I were in transit in Newark and our carryon bags had to go through the security check. Something in my wife’s bag caught the eye of the TSA officer in the xray, and she informed my wife that she would have to go through her bag. My wife immediately reached for her bag (to help open it), not knowing that it can be considered an act of aggression to touch your bag during the inspection process. I quickly stopped my wife and said to her, don’t touch your bag, otherwise that lady will shoot you.
The TSA officer overheard me, and in dead seriousness told my wife, “I will you know.” :eek:
Another time we were going flying out of the Delhi International airport with our handbags full of all sorts of household stuff (we were moving to the US). The xray security guy pulled me aside and pointed at the xray image on the computer display. “What is that spoon-shaped thing in your bag sir?”
Twice I had to walk out of Iraq during the war. One time, I driven to the Kuwaiti border, but they wouldn’t let my driver into Kuwait, so I walked across the border, paid a guy driving a camel truck to take me to the Raddisson Hotel. The Kuwaiti customs went through my luggage and one of them took a black magic marker and blacked out the face and body in every photograph of a woman in the Time magazine I was carrying.
Another time, I got stuck outside of my hotel in Baghdad during the Sadr uprising and because of the fighting, I couldn’t get back into the city. I drove to the Turkish border, took a cab to the airport, flew to Chicago, then to DC. At the Turkish border, they searched me and took everything I had that was in the Kurdish language (I had all my training materials with me when the uprising started).
A friend of mine used to regularly carry hash back from Amsterdam to Baghdad via Jordan, but he was insane.
My wife and I were visiting a friend in Washington, D.C., and I was going to propose (marriage) in front of the national Christmas tree. I had the ring in my carry-on bag. Being brown and a bit beardy, my bags nearly always get opened after the X-ray/backscatter security checkpoint. As I was walking up I realized the ring box was right on top and there was no way she wouldn’t see it if we went through security together. So I ran ahead and jumped into line in front of some old ladies. Neither they nor she were amused by this.
As it turned out, they didn’t open my bag and I got the stink eye from (now) Really All That Wife for most of the trip (until the proposal, and my subsequent explanation.)
In Saudi Arabia , I had a Lonely Plant travel book taken. I went to the supervisor and told him I had purchased it in Saudi, it still had the book store tag on it. He gave it back. One guy tried to take my mohair English teddy bear. (Idols and all) talked him out of they too.
