Customs & Immigration

I've never really had problems with customs and immigration people.  I remember getting my first passport when I was seventeen.  When I got my picture taken I was so afraid of the camera flash that my expression ended up an inelegant frown.

I haven't often visited countries that require a visa.  Almost twenty years ago I visited my sister who was teaching English in the Czech Republic, and I had to get a Czech visa beforehand, but that was pretty easy.  I visited China a few years later, but their visas were also easy to get:  they value their tourists.

I did have one problem in the mid-1990s.  I'd spent eight months researching my Ph.D. thesis in London, England.  Almost a year after returning to Toronto, I had to apply to get into the Ontario health care program.  I had a Canadian passport, and thought that would be enough.  But it turned out that the bureaucrats wanted proof that I was a Canadian resident as well as citizen. (They were afraid that I was a Canadian citizen who'd become a British resident who was now returning to Canada to sponge off the Canadian health care system.)

What bugged me was this.  At the place where you applied you'd stand in a preliminary queue for twenty minutes, before ascertaining that your papers were in order.  Then you'd go to the main queue and wait two more hours.  In my case, they told me at the first place that I had the right papers, but then at the second place they wanted more.  The first time I went back for better papers, but the second time they said it still wasn't good enough!  This time I put up a fuss about all the time I was wasting in their queues.  I was lucky:  they ended up giving me the coverage.