customs

i'm not the kind of person who ever gets stopped at airport customs. sometimes, people have actually been really dismissive of me. like, why are you standing there? like you're gonna have something to declare...

so i thought the guy was really trying to show he could do it, asking me if i had any of the pictured things in my luggage. first picture: porn. i'm a girl, what do you think? then, lots of pics of drugs. the first one i looked at, smiled and said no, and as i realised the others were all drugs too, kept smiling and saying no. he was smiling too, like he was saying, yes, this is stupid, obviously you don't have anything, i'm just doing my job.

then he asked me if i would mind going to another room. i thought, there you go, they have to do this to every 50th person or something. i had time to kill anyway, so i said it was ok. except by the time we got to the room, there were suddenly 4 customs officers with me. i thought, ok, fine, they need a token woman cos i'm one, this guy's too young anyway so the boss needs to be there, and an extra witness doesn't hurt.

in the tiny room (which looked very much like the tiny scary rooms where people get questioned in movies), the same guy asks me all the same questions. it must be to show the boss that he did ask, although i thought it was pretty pointless. then they ask if they can go through my bag and suitcase. sure. except, they go through the stuff really thoroughly. undoing socks to check nothing is hidden. my blue painkillers caused a stir. what were they? painkillers. what for? to kill pain (obviously). head pain? no, muscle pain. how often did i take them? when i was in pain (funnily enough). it was starting to feel very awkward. they seemed to think i was actually doing drugs. but they were very nice and polite, so i didn't worry too much. when they saw my camera film, one guy put it back but the boss took them all out again and actually seemed to want to open one of the films to check there was nothing else inside. that's when i started worrying. he also looked like he wanted to take the actual suitcase apart.

eventually, they put all the stuff back, much more neatly than i'd packed it. until then, everything had taken place in Japanese (which shows that 3 months of not studying it didn't do too much harm), but then the boss came out with a long sentence in Japanese and i just couldn't understand it. i looked a bit desperate, i'm sure, as i asked if he could say it in English. turns out the token woman was fluent in it. apparently, the dog had smelled drugs on　my suitcase. i was flabbergasted. i hadn't even been near anyone who'd do drugs (not that i know anyone who does anything more than smoke marijuana, which is legal, in Switzerland). they asked me if my friends did drugs. i said no.　the only thing i could think of was my father's new cat. it sounds silly, but i really couldn't think of why their dog had sensed anything that wasn't there.

anyway, that was why they'd taken me in and searched me. again, they were very polite about it all and none of their words or behaviour had made me feel uncomfortable, apart from their actually searching through my stuff like that. but the feeling of unease stayed with me most of the day after that. i've tried to come up with a reason, and i think i've nailed it: my father's house is being renovated, and my room had just been white-washed. it's a very smelly process, and full of chemicals.　and my suitcase was on that floor a whole 10 days...