visa – Climb to the Stars

USA Border Crossing Horror Stories [en]

[fr] Histoires d'horrreur en entrant aux USA. J'ai de moins en moins envie d'y remettre les pieds, j'avoue.

I’ve been listening to On The Media again, one of my favorite podcasts. You know, each time one of these US border crossing horror stories finds its way to me, what little desire I have to enter the US just melts away a bit more.

Here are a few I came across lately, and an old one that happened to a friend of mine.

My detainment story: or how I learned to stop feeling safe in my own country and hate border agents, by OTM producer Sarah Abdurrahman, who was detained along with other family members — all American citizens — upon returning from a wedding in Toronto.
Detained in the US for “visiting Thailand too much”, what happened to a friend of blogger Richard Barrow
The dark side of the US customs, by Runaway Juno
Don’t fly during Ramadan, by Aditya Mukerjee (I hope you’ll appreciate the Hindu/Muslim confusion as much as I did)
My US border nightmare, by admittedly ill-prepared Zak Homuth
And finally, “You’re not a Canadian anymore” (scroll down a few articles to find it), by my old IRC buddy Catspaw.

Now off to less depressing things for what’s left of my week-end — like eating my delicious plum tart.

20.10.2013 update: adding more below as I stumble on them.

Why I will never return to the USA, by Niels Gerson Lohman

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Thekkady [en]

In Thekkady, a hill-station in Kerala. Been sick, brief description of the place.

Thekkady is a nice hill-station. For the moment, the most I’ve seen of it is my hotel bedroom, thanks to the gastro-entritis that kept me in bed all day and in the bathroom all night. As far as I can see, Thekkady is mainly composed of a street lined with identical shops (with identical men in front of the shops trying to tempt you in by asking you what your name is and where you come from). When the street gets tired of shops, they turn into pretty expensive resorts, all next to each other (Cardamom Country, Spice Village, Taj Garden retreat and our more modest Ambady).

We got here yesterday after an afternoon on the road. We hired a private car, but gave up trying to communicate with the driver after he stopped the car and nearly turned back, obviously in a misguided attempt to try to satisfy an imaginary request of ours, when Anita was simply asking a curious question about the route we were taking.

Cellphones don’t work here, enquiries about paying with VISA are greeted with crispated smiles and a barely audible “no… cash please!”, and broadband internet access seems like science-fiction. You’ll therefore have to wait until I’m back in Mumbai (or at best, Cochin) to see any of the photos and videos Anita and I have been furiously shooting (within the limits of the storage space available on the memory card, of course).

I have quite a lot of backlog to type up, going back to my three weeks in Pune. Watch older entries, you might find new reading!

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