As some of you already know, this past Saturday, I was very happy to be picking Babci up from the airport after her 2 month trip to Poland. I was excited to see her and arrived on time to pick her up outside of the international arrivals gate. For those who’ve done it before, it’s a fun guessing game of figuring out if your loved one’s flight has made it through customs. The first thing you do is you look up at the board and see who else is arriving at roughly the same time and then keenly observe and eavesdrop the people greeting their relatives. The two flights ahead of the LOT Polish flight were from France. It wasn’t long before I saw some skinny pointy nosed French people coming out about 1/2 hour after their flight landed. After 45 minutes I saw the first signs of a Polish person. He didn’t look overly Polish aside from the cabbage head, but one couldn’t mistake the plastic shopping bag he was carrying with Polish writing on it. (If you even want to know what most Polish people look like, look at a cabbage patch doll.)
The Long Wait at International Arrivals
Due to Babci’s knee operations and her size, she requested wheelchair access. The last time she walked that distance it took her almost 2 hours to get from her plane to the exit. It took a lot out of her. I knew with a wheelchair, she’d skip the customs line and be able to zip through the customs pretty quickly. I expected her to be just around the corner now. Then 10, 20 and 30 minutes go by and still no babci. Finally I get a clue to an answer. Along walks out a TSA official with a little beagle sniffing around people’s carriages and I immediately thought to myself..oh no. Babci has no chance against a beagle. She was threatening to bring back pungent smoked kielbasa and a whole variety of food products with her. After well over an hour of standing, I convinced myself that if I just went over and sat in the lounge, she’s bound to come out. Sure enough there she was.
The poor wheelchair attendant looked weary. At over 250 pounds, she is heavy and he was trying to push her with one hand while pulling her 50 pound bag with the other. He started to lose a little control of her on the down ramp but they made it out the door with no incident. I suddenly thought the$5 tip I had out for him should have been larger. The first thing out of Babci’s mouth was “they took everything”. She was visibly upset and kept repeating herself over and over. “They took everything, they took everything”. Clearly she still had a massive and extremely weighty bag that I was lugging, so I knew she was exaggerating. I tried to calm her down and said “who cares, you took a chance and got caught. At least you arrived safely.” I also told her she just got lucky all those other times she came back from Poland and didn’t get caught.
Babci’s Contraband and Mug Shot
When she finally calmed down, I found out the many things she had in her luggage that may have been an issue. It could have been the onion bulbs, or the 5 pounds of European style butter. She had an assortment of seeds in clear baggies and multiple bags of white powdery stuff. One bag looked like crack (but was actually ammonia baking powder partially petrified). She also had 2 ziplocs of powdered limestone that looked like a big bag of cocaine. Ugh..I shake my head. Babci claims it was the smoked kielbasa’s fault, but then I found the real answer to being busted and she might as well have painted a big red flag on her luggage. She decided she needed to bring back a 5 pound sack of poppy seeds in her suitcase. She didn’t realize that poppies make opium and that when the beagle found her suitcase, his sniffing and tale wagging was a sign that he just hit the drug sniffing jackpot.
Babci was questioned at length to the nature of the poppies and why she was bringing them to the US. She said: “I make cakey”, she rubbed her stomach, smacked her lips and said “Delicious.” She used the same answer for the butter. I don’t know if they even bothered to ask her about the lime.
After Babci was photographed and her nine digits were fingerprinted and put into some terrorist database, they eventually let her go. I wonder if they put nicknames on the files like they used to do on old west wanted posters. “Babci the 9 fingered poppy bandit.”
Home At Last
At the airport, Babci was too busy getting her mug shot and fingerprints taken to notice what exactly had been extracted from her luggage. The first thing she wanted to do was open her suitcase to assess her losses. She still had her vodka and at least 5 pounds of assorted chocolates for the kids. Most of her seed packets had made it through, even the ones that were in unmarked plastic baggies. I dug a little deeper and I found her butter. “Wow..they let you keep the butter. That’s awesome.” Then to my surprise, there it was, in all it’s glory, the 5 pound bag of poppies. Surprisingly, the only things they took were the onion bulbs and kielbasa. I absolutely couldn’t believe it.
As I suspected, it didn’t take long before I had more material for my next article. I’m so glad the customs guys were so nice to Babci.
Lesson learned. Don’t bring back food products that can be made into drugs and don’t bring home smelly meat that a dog would love to eat. Perhaps this experience will even make her adhere to the actual customs rules on food + animal products.
Leave a Reply