When you take up residence in a foreign land it’s only natural to have moments of confusion about who you are and what you’re doing… But when you have one of these moments in front of German Immigration officers after being pulled aside while attempting to enter the country… well, that spells trouble…

“Speake de Deutche?” he asked, more forcefully this time…

“No, I don’t speak German. And I’m not doing anything wrong… just trying to go to a publishing conference in Bonn.”

“Where’s your ticket from here to Bonn?”

“I don’t have a ticket yet. They only gave me the tickets for Buenos Aires to Sao Paolo, and Sao Paolo to Frankfurt. They said I’d get the tickets for the next leg when I arrived in Frankfurt.”

“So, you don’t have a ticket?”

“No, they haven’t given it to me yet.”

“What about your bagage, where’s your bagage ticket?”

“I don’t have that either, it was on my boarding stub and I must have accidently left it at my seat…”

“You’ll have to come with us.”

After a 14 hour series of flights, your weary correspondent was whisked passed immigration, following the big ‘agent’ in the black leather jacket and followed by two other burly German plain-clothes polizei.

When we reached the investigation nook and a large stainless steal table, he said, “Empty out everything from your pockets. You haven’t been handling any drugs have you?”

“Drugs!? No, I haven’t… I don’t… anything…”

I held out my hands and was swabbed by a plastic testing device. They had taken out my laptop and were running tests on it as well as looking through my bag for the third time.

The disturbing thing was the way they were looking at the drug test kit and talking about the unfolding results… They seemed to be arguing with each other about what the results meant… “Oh, god”, I thought, “do they know how to use that thing?! Did I touch something in our apartment building, in the cab, in the airport??”

Then the agent in the black jacket put the drug testor in his pocket and stepped close…

“Look you’re coming from South America, so, we have to take precautions… You can go now.”

Maybe it was my appearance, the beard and need for a hair-cut… Our fumbling with answers about ‘living’ in Argentina, but only having been there for two weeks… Our story always sounds suspicious (even to friends and family). The roster of Central and South American countries on our passport certainly didn’t help…

Whatever it was I sure as hell hope I don’t have to go through that every time I enter Europe from South America!

After the interrogation we had to run to make our train for Cologne. We shivered on the platform as the train pulled up. All of our warm clothes were in our checked luggage. And when we arrived at the Cologne station we came to find that our checked luggage did not get there with us… We wondered the train station in our short-sleeved polo shirt until we found one of the few coats for sale (it was an ugly thing with a pathetic fake fur collar and the brand name ‘Russian Solid Jeans’, but dammit it’s warm!). On a Sunday afternoon all the clothes stores were closed. So, here we are with a week long conference ahead of us and only the clothes on our back…

Will our bag show up? We’ll see… More to come from the land of the Huns…