Nipon

Monday, November 19, 2007

How hard is it for an Iranian to get out of US?


SSSS
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If you are from "certain" countries and you have traveled within US, you know what I am talking about. This is a sign which can be seen on a boarding pass. I have not googled it yet, but I am guessing it means something like "Super Suspicious Security Sign" or "Suspicious^4". If your boarding pass carries such mark your security check in the airport would be a little bit different. All of your belongings would be searched for explosives and you might have ended up with a body check. I think they mainly check for electrical devices and if you are unlucky a bit like me, the system that detects the smell of explosive, might have a false positive alarm! If that happen, the rest is up to you and your luck. In my case, I was lucky, since they double checked my camera with another machine and they received a negative sign. They apologized for the inconvenience, but I think I began to hate this SSSS sign.

Special Registry
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As I described in my previous post, entering to and departing from US is a bit tricky for people like me. When I entered from the Montreal border the registration took so long that I missed my flight. This time the outgoing registry also took a lot of time in Chicago airport. The US registry office is located in Terminal 5 (International Terminal) which is a bit far for people traveling to Canada since their flight are not counted as international and fly from internal terminals. Yes, I missed my 9:45 AM connection to Calgary and consequently my connection from Calgary to Edmonton. After running between United Airline and Air Canada, I was put in the waiting list for the flight to Edmonton on 7:55 PM. This means more than 10 hours... What should I do in between? Well they put another SSSS on my boarding card and that filled a bit of the time again! I got some food and desert and refreshed myself. Currently, the time is 2:25 PM and I am sitting near a young boy writing these lines. Fortunately, I could find a power plug to put some juice into my laptop.

Still in Chicago
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You might not believe it if I tell you that I encountered the worst case scenario. The only hope to get inside my bed tonight and forget about the rough day was shattered a few hours ago as the flight had some fuel problems and they had to even cancel the flight of some of the confirmed passengers. Currently it is 11:15 PM here and my flight is going to be tomorrow at 9:25 AM. The nice person in the customer service made sure to secure the fun for me tomorrow as well. I have a new SSSS on my card again! This is the last time I am flying with United Airlines. They lack all kinds of concepts for taking good care of their customers.

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