Dude, this sucks. None of you are awake there!
Anyway, it took like 2 hours but we managed to clear everything up with customs, although for a long time it seriously looked like we might get slapped with an EIGHT THOUSAND DOLLAR fine and/or jail time. HOLY FUCK. Although, if I were to be stuck in a foreign jail, I think an Australian jail would be pretty civilized. I'd like to give a big shoutout of thanks to Teammate's mom (who packed his bag) and was so concerned that we might not feed him on the trip and he would starve and die that she didn't think that filling his bag full of fruit might instead send him off to rot in an Australian prison. W00T! (Seriously, Australians customs DOESN'T FUCK AROUND.)
The rest of the day was much fun. I got to hold a koala and pet kangaroos but, alas, did not see a wallaby. Kind of hallucinating from the sleep deprivation at this point but can't go to sleep yet because I'm trying to adjust to the timezone.
Aussie prisons may or may not be (relatively) nice. Australian detention centers for asylum seekers: not so nice.
Also, glad to hear you're not in jail or anyfing.
A few us of work ungodly graveyard shifts. That's an awesome story. Was it a baby koala? I've heard the wild ones can really claw the hell out of you.
And a few of us are actually in Australia.
Was it the sniffer beagles that found you out? (Australians aren't *quite* so paranoid of people of middle-eastern appearance, btw, especially fruit smuggling ones. Agricultural disease is far more of an issue.)
Oh, and if you want any travel tips, on cool places to take your brother for that all-important inaugural drink or whatever, I'm happy to provide 'em.
Heh, and I got the kitten on my first comment! Yay cute kitty!
I feel your pain. The boys got held up at the airport for almost an hour the other day b/c the border guy thought that Mr. B. might be abducting a little girl, claiming she was his "son."
Sooo, how different is this from the Craigslist personals people, I wonder? It's widely known that Australia (& NZ) are paranoid about people importing fruits and meats, and there are big signs (saying, almost literally, "THIS IS YOUR LAST CHANCE TO DUMP FOOD BEFORE CUSTOMS") next to bins in the baggage area. Combine that with the "Oh I didn't pack this little kid's suitcase even though they're traveling with me, and they're not related to me either" defense and you're well on the way to deserving the fine they slap on you.
for a long time it seriously looked like we might get slapped with an EIGHT THOUSAND DOLLAR fine and/or jail time
And they'd be right to do it. If you released that beef jerky into the wild it could rapidly overpopulate the area and dominate its new habitat with no natural predators to keep it in check.
Oops. And I bet they yanked the spots they show on the plane about customs, where Steve Irwin explains that the one animal he doesn't mess around with is the sniffer beagles. RIP Steve Irwin (who I should point out doesn't seem to have been doing anything particularly dangerous).
gonerill, I'm not feeling you. If Becks had known that the suitcase was full of food her teammate's idiot mother had packed then it would've been stupid of her not to dump it. But the point is that she didn't know. There are other disanalogies with the Craigslist case too (no betrayal of trust, no publication of embarrassing details, no sex, basically the two cases have nothing in common).
6, that's really funny in a horrifying way.
re: 8
Isolated island continents with a history of massive ecological devastation caused by imported species, diseases and pests probably have a good reason not to be keen on the import of foodstuffs. I'm just sayin' ...
Becks wasn't to know the contents of the case, of course. On the other hand, I wouldn't have carried someone else's case through customs. Customs and immigration are humourless bastards. I though that was universal travel lore.
Isolated island continents with a history of massive ecological devastation caused by imported species, diseases and pests probably have a good reason not to be keen on the import of foodstuffs.
That was the joke. Thanks for squishing it, joke-squisher.
Customs and immigration are humourless bastards.
Actually on my return from Australia the customs guy wanted to chat about philosophy when I told him what I'd been doing there. He wondered how the job market was these days, apparently he'd done some grad school in philosophy twenty years ago and they'd been saying that jobs would be opening up any day as professors retired, but it didn't happen so he went on another path. One thing in particular I remembered was that he wanted to know if Putnam had retired yet.
This made me glad I didn't go on the market twenty years ago.
The general point is well taken though.
no betrayal of trust, no publication of embarrassing details, no sex, basically the two cases have nothing in common
Sure they do, in terms of people's reactions. People's feelings about the culpability of the CL people and Becks' case are probably strongly correlated. At a minimum, I'd guess that people who had even a slight feeling that the CL people had it coming also feels that Becks was being foolish in this case.
re: 11
If I can't be humourlessly literal here, where can I be?
9: Australian customs dogs are beagles? How cute.
I'm glad they let you walk, Becks, but the story would have been a lot better if they had put you in jail. The FUCKING FRUIT!
Customs and immigration are humourless bastards.
the customs guy...[had] done some grad school in philosophy
I think you're one of about five people in the world who would put an "actually" between those two statements, Matt.
16: American too, at least sometimes. Back when Mom was flying out of JFK, bags were examined by the Citrus Beagle. I think the idea was that for drugs, you don't mind intimidating people with a German Shepherd, but if you're just looking for illicit foodstuffs, you want a non-scary dog.
14: But, you see, Becks is our friend. Also, carrying food across a border is not even potentially sexist, and I'm willing to bet that she'd have been horrified if/when she'd found out that she'd accidentally imported fruit into an island ecosystem like that.
I've seen beagle sniffer dogs at US airports, too.
carrying food across a border is not even potentially sexist,
Metaphorically, though.
You know what place is seriously insane about importing fruit? Arizona. I mean, wtf?
Whoa, some surprising halftime scores. J.P. Losman pwning Tom Brady, and Denver with the many turnovers.
Seriously, though, why did teammate's mom put fruit in the suitcase? What kind of fruit? Apples? Bananas? Oranges a) that's gross b) wouldn't it go bad? Isn't this a long trip? Is she worried about her son getting scurvy?
Hey baby, you can import your mango any time.
25: My mother in law does that kind of thing too.
24: Do you know why Fox traded JB to CBS and got a new Stocky Black Man (TM)?
Seriously, could beagles be any awesomer?
Nope. (I"m not actually watching, I'm doing stuff around the house. Or, not doing stuff around the house but commenting.)
the last time I flew, a beagle sniffer dog got all into my backpack, so his handler just asked me, "Did you have food in that?" I was a little affronted that I wasn't considered search-worthy, but that's because I thought it was a drug-and-explosives dog. Now that I know it was just a fruit hound I don't feel so bad.
It's probably not actually all that likely you'd do gaol time. It happens all the time. The people behind you in line may have had the urge to kill though. At Sydney at least, regular traveller lore is that it's faster to buy a chocolate bar and declare it than it is to go through the nothing to declare section.
However, there are no guarentees. I once flew into Sydney from Bangkok and wanted to declare some random wooden trinkets and a packet of chocolate bikkies and got stuck behind a woman bringing in a couple of big bags of unidentified dried herbs. She didn't speak English and was also mostly blind and couldn't read the "Australia does not want your random big bags of unidentifed herbs" info sheets they had helpful translated into about 18 languages. So they ran around asking if anyone spoke Chinese while half the passengers gave them dirty looks and pointed out that they were Thai and the other half muttered "which Chinese language do you mean, exactly?" until the next shift came on, which had a customs officer who spoke the same language as the woman with the herbs and I finally got my stuff checked. And didn't turn violent. But I wanted to.
We even have a show about it that I'm meant to be watching for my computing PhD (don't even ask). Border Security. I've seen exactly one episode in which a kindly mother tries to bring some duck meat and chicken feet into New Zealand for her daughter. That didn't go so well either. Mothers everywhere are worried that the antipodes can't feed their children well.
Hilary Swank was fined two hundred dollars for trying to import a half-eaten apple (or something along those lines) into New Zealand. She appealed - presumably invoking the movie-star-exemption clause - but lost. I have a feeling Becks might be lucky she's in Australia.
29: Beagles are indeed the most adorable of dogs, but they're actually kind of stubborn and can be sort of obnoxious in person.
They do indeed use totally cute beagles to sniff your bag. Also, I was not the person who was going to be thrown in the slammer -- it was my mom, who was the unfortunate soul who signed the customs declaration form. I sailed through, which was almost worse as they took mom and Teammate away and wouldn't let us see them. I would have much rather dealt with customs myself than know my mom was off getting interrogated.
I was not the person who was going to be thrown in the slammer -- it was my mom, who was the unfortunate soul who signed the customs declaration form.
Luckily, Tim had a replacement lined up.
But would you rather be arrested than let her find out about your penis pump?
"Nine times out of ten, it's an ordinary electric razor. But every once in a while..."
Nine times out of ten it's an ordinary electric razor that can play Mornington Crescent and weighs less than a pack of cigarettes.
From that link in #38
Amin may not want his mother to know he has a penis pump, but he said he doesn't consider it an unusual device to own.
"It's normal," he said. "Half of America they use it."
Uh, half?
