baslog

Baslog, now in English

WhenI am in the States I write in Dutch, now that I am in Belgium, I thought I should write in English....

The flight to Belgium was swift and comfortable. It was a bit of a hassle to get from the Twin Cities in to O’hare, but once in Chicago things got easier. I hopped right on the American Airlines flight, which was only 1/3 full, and left rainy, cold, foggy Chicago to arrive seven and a half hours later safe and sound in rainy, cold, foggy Belgium. I felt like the pilgrims from the Mayflower, who traveled across the Atlantic all the way from Plymouth only to arrive in….Plymouth ( © Eddie Izzard.)

If the weather left some room to doubt whether or not I actually traveled 4000 miles, the custom formalities made it clear I was back in my cute we-do-things-our-way slightly racist little country. This is what normally happens when you go through customs upon arriving in Belgium: on your way to the exit you walk through an area with about six to eight custom officials, who usually are too busy making wise cracks amongst themselves and taking smoke breaks to actually check luggage. I have only been stopped once, when I took my desktop computer in to Belgium. “What’s in there?” a customs guy asked. “A computer I bought in the States and am taking back to Belgium sir, I am a grad student in Minneapolis.” He looked at me in a boys will be boys kind of way and asked “so did you go to class a lot or did you skip to go (at which point he imitated someone drinking) instead?” In most countries the correct answer would be: “No sir, I took this opportunity to educate myself and attended all classes in order to someday come back and apply my knowledge to the betterment of our country.” But I knew that this would not be the password that would get me in to Belgium, so I gave him the wink wink, nudge nudge answer that I knew would get him off my back: “Yes sir, shitfaced at least twice a week.” Bingo, his face changed in to a welcoming smile, I was clearly an all-Belgian boy who was doing the honorable Belgian thing, no need to check this guy out.

So I was mildly surprised to see that there was huge line at customs Friday morning. I asked the guy in front of me who I noticed spoke in the same backward dialect as I, what was going on. “It is always the same when a plane with those guys comes in, always trouble.” I looked over to the customs area and saw what he meant by “those guys.” A plane from Kinshasa (The Congo) had landed, and that apparently had inspired the custom guys to taking a more pro-active stance. Every African was stopped and had to open his/her suitcase, which was quite the task since all of them happened to be taped shut. I could look straight in to the customs area and saw one customs official rummaging through one woman’s luggage for everyone to see (privacy is really only an abstract ideal in Europe, something we write in to our constitutions to make us feel morally superior to America, not something we really take all that seriously) that consisted entirely of some kind of spinach-like leaves. For some reason she was waived through, but the next women who had packed her suitcase full of vegetables, fruits and other weird looking wrapped-up semi-edibles was less lucky, the customs officer started to toss the items in a trash bin. She tried to grab them back out of his hands, but that only made him more resolute and all of a sudden I saw a Belgian customs officer pretending to take his job seriously. When she was protesting he angrily responded: “Restez là bas hein madame.” (“If you don’t like it here, you can stay there.”) He seemed to be really happy to be able to say this without feeling guilty. He also sounded like he really meant it. It was an ugly scene. These women had packed all these beautiful colorful foods so they could share a taste of Africa with their relatives living in grey and foggy Brussels, and some uniform with a hidden agenda all of a sudden decides to go on a power trip and lay down the law on them, while he lets every one with a white face pass by unhindered. I know the law is the law, but there is something wrong with applying it so selectively. Just let them take their veggies in. It is not like the crops in Europe are that vulnerable. It is Europe that exports its diseases and plagues to the rest of the world (Dutch Elm disease), our crops are
actually pretty resistant .

I was even more ashamed when I saw how some of the African American passengers who had been on my flight from Chicago were summoned in French to open their suitcases. The customs agents had cast their net of racial profiling over everyone who was black, whether they came off of the Kinshasa flight or not. I was glad to be out of there.

My parents waited at the other side and we went for breakfast at the Sheraton hotel in the airport, which served one heck of a brunch combining the abundance of America (tons of eggs, bacon and sausage) with the sophistication of Europe (some cheeses that were not orange, mini jars of jam, and real yoghurt). The perfect way to make the transition from my one home to the other one. It was perfect, until my mom got caught by some other guests when she crammed a breakfast roll in her purse.

Posted by vana0047 at January 2, 2005 04:47 AM