Same thing happened to me. I was travelling from Tallinn, Estonia to Paris and I had a very short layover ('bout an hour, IIRC) in Finland. The Finns stamped my passport but I never got a stamp in France. Greedy ink-hoarding bastards :mad:.
This was a very long process. One of my best friends was born in Estonia in 1979 to Russian parents. His passport says Alien :eek:
He’s never been a citizen of any country and he has an incredibly hard time travelling (though he’s currently in America on an open-ended visa )
I had trouble with customs coming into London off the Eurostar. I have dual citizenship, so I was travelling on a British passport. I actually made it through customs all right, the guy just glanced at my passport and waved me through, so I started heading off to the Tube to figure out how to get to my hostel (no family in London, sadly), when I heard another customs agent yelling after me. Turns out the problem was that I hadn’t bothered removing the flight tags from my bag since they weren’t in the way. They thought it was suspicious that a British citizen who had flown somewhere recently was taking the train back. It also didn’t help matters initially that I was tired, so my response to “How long have you been out of the country?” was “Uh, about 10 years.” Luckily I managed to get matters sorted out fairly quickly and continue on my merry way.
I’ve never had a second glance from US customs and immigration, but I did once get a “stern talking to” from UK immigration because I had so many entry stamps into England. A shrew of a woman started asking me some very odd questions (“So, you like coming over here frequently, DON’T YOU???”, “Just what does it mean having all these trips here???”" of course the answers were “yes, and you answered your own question”). She snatched my passport, told me “not to move”, and took it back a dozen feet to a little podium where a supervisor was standing. He took my passport from her, flipped through it, looked at her, looked down at the passport again, looked at me, shrugged and had a look on his face as if to say “And…?”, then she snatched the passport back from him, stamped it on the wrong page, and nearly threw it in my face.
So I guess the Passport Guy (in the OP) thought that if you were in Iraq you could have been meeting with terrorists but not in Qatar, Tunisia or Yeman as those countries are terrorist free.
)