London

So I’m writing this post from London, the greatest city in the world. That’s right! Eat your heart out New York! London is better, even though I’ve never visited New York, and probably never will. My passport is a passport control officer’s wet dream, especially if they’re American. You see I have an Algerian passport, issued in Beirut Lebanon, and I was born in Iraq. Isn’t that nice? When I go through passport control I can always see a little spark in the eye of the officer. That spark usually conveys their thoughts, you can see that they can already hear the rubber glove snap as the search goes intimate.

So what I do in order to avoid making their dreams a reality is try to bamboozle them, and by that I don’t mean pulling a rabbit out of my hat or flowers out of thin air. What I do is a bit more subversive and dare I say it, insidious. First, I try to always travel with my guitar or some attribute of a rocker, like a band’s t-shirt or something. That is phsze one of operation bamboozle a passport control officer. Because you can see their tiny little brains trying to comprehend the juxtaposition of the information they thought they gathered from the passport and the fact that I play guitar, or seem to be into rock music. It’s very funny to watch. it’s funny to see them think things like ‘but they don’t play guitar?’. So that’s only phase one.

Phase two is a little more fun. It involves being extremely polite to them and speaking perfect English. That just throws them off. They are really unprepared for politeness and even less for a good command of the language. It’s also fun fixing their mistakes with a smile on my face and with so much honey in my voice and tone that they cannot but be grateful. I remember this girl, who really felt like a teenager, and she was telling me that she couldn’t understand why my passport was issued in Baghdad. She was speaking with very bad grammar. So I explained to her, in excellent English that in fact I was born in Baghdad and that as she could see, right where I was pointing, the passport was actually issued in Beirut. She actually said ‘oh thanks! Sorry!’ And she couldn’t be rude to me, as she was being until then, because I was so nice.

So Anyway, yeah, take this New York, London is the greatest city not you! And I will never visit you. Because while my strategies might work for UK passport control, I somehow don’t think it’ll work on US ones. I just don’t think I can avoid the rubber glove in the US. Getting back to what I was saying. I am in London now. I had a nice long day cleaning my flat. I finished and then went down on the train.

The train journey was okay. There was this girl sitting in the aisle next to me who had an advance ticket but not a reservation. Which is just crazy! Anyone who’s ever been on a train in this country knows that an advance ticket is only valid with a reservation. But she didn’t have one. So the ticket controller explained that it said so on her ticket. She started being rude and , saying ‘you know what? It’s not my problem! the machine only gave me that one!’ Which is a flat old lie. The man was very nice about it but firm. he explained that in fact it was her problem and that if the machine didn’t give her the reservation then she should have gone to the human tickets salespeople who would have given it to her. He also explained that she needed to pay for a full ticket now.

This went on for a while. The girl was getting more and more agitated and ruder while the man was being nicer and nicer to her. He explained that if she didn’t want to pay she would have to get off at the next station. Ten minutes in the conversation she finally agreed to pay. She still wanted to use her railcard, which of course is not allowed. So she threw a hissy fit and tore her old ticket in half. The man with perfect comedic timing and with the sweetest tone told her ‘Well you are going to have a problem though since that ticket included another destination, and because you tore it in half you will now have to pay for that other trip as well’. And then he left. It was very satisfying for me to see him use the polite strategy against this stupid bitchy girl. He had won the contest brilliantly.