Seanan McGuire (seanan_mcguire) wrote,
Seanan McGuire
seanan_mcguire

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In which Seanan rides two planes, drinks a lot of Diet Coke, and confuses Customs.

Australia!

On Friday, August 27th, I left work to head for Kate's house, since she (and her wonderful car) was going to get me to the airport. My flight, I said, left at eight, so I needed to be there at six. I was quite confident on this point. There will be more on this later.

Even after driving to Concord, packing the last of my things, brushing the cats in a guilty "please don't hate me for leaving you" manner, and stopping at Sweet Tomatoes for dinner, we got me to the airport by four. Being the sort of person who'd rather be horrifyingly early than five minutes late, I was cool with this, hugged Kate, and went to check in with the calm serenity of one who is four hours early for their flight. Everything went without a hitch, including security, which was a glorious wasteland, free of congestion. Things were looking up.

Jeanne was already at the gate when I got there. "Wow, you're early," I said. She gave me a funny look.

"I'm two hours early for our flight," she replied.

"...what?" Apparently, I had been basing my internal flight time off the time we would be arriving in LAX for our transfer. Because sometimes, yes, I am very, very blonde. Coyote was clearly already getting involved in the trip; that's the first time I have ever made a mistake like that about flight times.

The first flight was relatively painless (I slept the whole way, which always helps), and our luggage was checked all the way through to Melbourne. So we located our gate, confirmed that there was no way for Qantas to shuffle things to seat us together, and then adjourned to the airport bar to make offerings to Coyote in the form of overpriced cocktails. Hooray for an excellent Mai Tai!

On the plane (a new Air Bus the size of an entire wing at my high school), we were seated literally sixty rows apart, so we bid each other a fond farewell and went to our respective homes for the next seventeen hours. Now, the nice thing about the Qantas Air Bus is the self-serve mini-bar between each section of the plane. They don't contain alcohol, thankfully, as an entire plane of drunk tourists would suck, but they do contain a nigh-infinite supply of Diet Coke. I drank a lot of Diet Coke. I also slept, a lot, and watched several movies, including Iron Man 2, which no one had been willing to see with me in the theater. Hooray for trans-Pacific flights!

Blah blah blah, time passes, blah blah blah, airplane food, blah blah, landing! In...Sydney. Because, see, Melbourne? Was enshrouded with fog, preventing us from landing, and after flying from California, we didn't have the fuel to circle. So we had to divert to another city altogether, which delighted the flight crew to no end. (It actually did delight the rest of my row, as they'd been going to Sydney, and were allowed to deplane. With their luggage. Lucky bastards.)

Eventually, we got back into the air, and were able to fly, finally, to Melbourne, where we had to go through Customs. First question on the card they make you fill out, no shit, was, "Are you carrying any weapons, illegal drugs, or prescription medications?" So the first question I was asked by the Australian Customs Agent was which of these things I had. I replied that I had legal medications. Also food. She sent me to Quarantine, while Jeanne went off to not be Quarantined.

At Quarantine, I was asked, "What kind of food are you carrying?"

Honesty is the best policy with Customs: "A pound of chocolates and five pounds of candy corn."

Blink. "What's candy corn?"

"Honey, mallow, and canuba wax."

"How much is five pounds?"

"I don't know. Two and a half kilos?"

She blinked again, and then waved to the door. "Just go."

Jeanne, meanwhile, was being poked and prodded to confirm that she wasn't secretly smuggling strawberries in her pants. The moral of our story is? Carry confusing candy.

Australia!
Tags: australia makes you die, candy corn, in the wild, jeanne, wild adventures
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Yeeps. It's a good thing you're weird enough to balance out your blondeness! Glad you didn't miss your flight.

Haaaaa to the diversion to Sydney. And the people who got there early. Oh, air travel.

Australia!
It was brilliant.
Oh, dear. I'm glad you made your flights, that they went well, and that Quarantine let you out.


Honesty is the best policy with Customs:

Except sometimes, when agreeing with them even though they're wrong is the best policy. When I was in high school, I ended up embroiled in a discussion with a US Customs officer in Miami as to whether Phoenix or Nogales was the capital of Arizona. (In long retrospect, I think he may have been teasing me, but I was way the hell underslept and way the hell underfed and wired on way the hell too much coffee and sugar to pick up on that at the time.)

He finally said something like, "I'm from Nogales and I should know."

To which I blinked, considered briefly, and said, "You know, sir, you're absolutely correct and I was confused. Nogales IS the capital of Arizona."

He then waved me and my entire party of 20+ underslept, underfed, and wired teenagers through the checkpoint.
When in doubt, revise the universe! Good policy, really.
I've done the thing with mis-remembering flights before, but it worked out much worse than me. Glad it worked out for you, and that you didn't find the 17 hour flight too horrible.
It was significantly easier than expected!
Yay for enjoying long flights! I highly enjoyed my flight from Seattle to London a few years ago. And in the process, learned something about myself. Being a long time smoker, I was worried about going insane on the flight. Nope. Just went insane in the line for customs. They were dangling the ability to smoke just in front of me, yet an hour and a half away. Bastards!

But yes, yay for being massively early for when you thought the flight was turning into being right "on time" for when it actually was! That could have been a hell of a lot worse.
Coyote was just making sure I got things off to the right sort of start. Because he loves me so.
Jim brought gummy bears. Jim got dirty looks from the guys in Customs because it kept their dog very busy trying to figure it all out.

DOG: FOOD!!
Customs Dude: Not food, come on.
DOG: (Shuffles off, checks other guys, comes Right Back) FOOD!!
Customs Dude: (STINK EYE)
Us: 9_9
Heeeeee.
Glad you had a good flight.

And ugh, not being able to sleep on planes I would have just blanked and stared at being asked what candy corn was.
I'm trying to learn to make it. So I have to know what it contains.
Good that the flight was comfortable, but shouldn't it have been a transpacific flight? This may explian the lack of fuel at landing, although I thought onlt northwest pilots were that bad at navigation.
Whoops, corrected.

argonel

6 years ago

seanan_mcguire

6 years ago

You brought five pounds of candy corn to Australia?

The whole food quarantine thing is the best laugh I've had all day.
Yes.

And I would DO IT AGAIN.
Only you would take FIVE POUNDS of candy corn to Australia *LOL*
I needed it!
I love the candy corn story, although I confess that if asked what it was I would not have been able to list the ingredients. My answer would have been along the lines of, "cheap candy that sorta looks like corn?"
I'm learning how to make it. So I sort of need to know what it contains.
I have put in a request to my fiancé that he bring back candy corn from the US when he comes home to Aust. later this year. I want to try this apparently delicious treat.
Don't be surprised if you hate it. Candy corn is a very polarizing food, and it's not good if it's not fresh.
cue hysterical laughter

Five pounds of candy corn.

Only you.

ONLY YOU!!
It was delicious. I have no regrets.

I have managed to elicit this sort of confusion from Canadian customs on no less then three occasions. Twice this caused the "just go" reaction. The other time it caused the customs agent to fob me and my friend (we were being processed together as we had a shared receipt for the clothing purchase that had put us over the exemption limit) off on another agent.

Just go #1: My first World Fantasy Con. In Minneapolis. I went nuts at Dreamhaven and Uncle Hugo's before the convention, and then got the convention goody bag and hit the dealers room. I also had a suitcase already half full of books that I had brought with me to the con to get signed. I ended up grabbing a box from the reg table to take all my extra books home. However, because many of the books I had purchased were used, all this booty did not push me much over the customs limit. So when going through, the customs officer looks at me, looks at my box, and asks me if my "$225 in new and used books" are in the box - obvious he's under the impression that I'm a book merchant. So I say yes ... and in my suitcase ... and probably some in my carry-on. At which point his eyes glazed and he waved me through as I was clearly The Paper rather than a book dealer.

Just go #2: Flying in from NYC to Ottawa, after having spent a night visiting Merav after a trip through Northern Europe. At the time the US/Canada exchange was abysmal (1.50 CDN to 1.00 US) and a common attempted trick to avoid duties was to declare what one had spent in US dollars and fail to mention the currency (thus implying $CDN). Thus "and how much in US$" was a normal question asked by customs. The agent looks at my form (where I declared the max CDN exemption allowed, and asks me how much I spent in US$. I blinked (yes the question caught me off guard), and stated that I had no idea, as I hadnt bought anything in the US. "So where did you buy things" she asks. I think a moment (slightly sleep deprived) and start listing: "Iceland, Norway, Finland, Sweden, maybe Den-" at which point she rolled her eyes, stopped me and waved me through.

Confusing customs #3: NOT MY FAULT - it was after Arisia AND a blizzard! (well just a little my fault) - when a customs agent looks at the form on which you have written $250 clothing, asks you what the clothing was, and then asks you what a corset is after you reply, sensible non-sleep-deprived people reach into their luggage to show the officer what a corset is. I was not the sensible non-sleep-deprived person. That was my friend who was stuck with me as our corsets were on the same receipt. Instead, I was the person who looked baffled, and then tried to describe what a corset was by miming it's effects on the female silhouette with my hands. Until the customs officer looked perturbed, told me to stop talking, and fobbed us off on another agent to process the money we owed for being over the limit. And lo, now I never get to look down the fact that I once scared a customs agent.


Hee hee hee hee.

This rocks.
...Iron Man 2, which no one had been willing to see with me in the theater.

Damn. Had I known this sooner, I would have TOTALLY gone with you. In IMAX, even (which I couldn't convince gridlore to do).

kshandra

6 years ago

seanan_mcguire

6 years ago

I am in the same boat as you are in the rather be three hours early than five minutes late.

When my mom was young and coming back from Brazil on a trip, she got stopped at the "border" in the LAX airport because she looked like and had the same name as a terrorist at the time. She also had a ton of candy on her that her relatives gave her to give to her sister stuffed into pockets on the clothes that they insisted she wear so that she wouldn't have to buy an extra bag.

Clearly this was entirely suspicious.

She said it was one of the most terrifying times of her life, especially since she knew her family was right out there, but the guards had taken her passport and so she had no 'legal' rights in this no man's land.

I would like to say that perhaps carrying confusing candy isn't the best moral.
Perhaps carrying it on your person, which looks a lot like smuggling, isn't the best move.
I've confused Canadian customs once. My hubby and I were driving up to pick up a friend and drive him back to the states and I had some costume gear in the back of the car. So we get to Customs and they pull us inside. They keep us waiting for two hours and then ask us when the wedding is. We look at them in confusion and tell them we're just picking up a friend. They say "Then why do you have a wedding dress in the back of your car?" My hubby and I look at each other confused and say,"We don't have a wedding dress in the car, it's just a hoop skirt, for a costume." "Oh, then you can go." Two hours wasted.
...ooooops.
This just proves, as you and I both know, that candy corn is absolutely essential. That and dark chocolate, and I'm set.

BTW, I think it is really thoughtless of Qantas not to have Diet Dr. Pepper. It's really wrong. They need to keep writers happy on long flights with familiar comforts.
Australians don't really get Dr Pepper. I wondered what it tasted like until I got to the States on a trip many years ago and actually tried it. Ick! Carbonated cough medicine.

dharawal

6 years ago

seanan_mcguire

6 years ago

seanan_mcguire

6 years ago

candy corn rocks
Word.
Confusing candy is great. We brought back two 5 kilo bars of chocolate from a con in Jersey (the Channel Island, not the state) as well as a very nice and quite pricey gold and opal ring. When we got to customs and were asked what we were declaring we started with the chocolate and they rushed off into 'chocolate is a food, you can go' before we could mention the ring. It's not food for tax purposes, it's a luxury subject to full VAT but since they didn't even let us get to mention the ring I was *not* going to argue.
Hee!
That is the most amazing quarantine story EVER.

Is there a brand of candy corn that tastes good? The cheap bags my mother got when I was little tasted terrible.
Brand new fresh Brach's candy corn is the best thing ever.
Nice. That reminds me of the year I spent in New Zealand - my mother came to visit, and I had her bring several jars of marshmallow cream and some bags of butterscotch chips (like chocolate chips, but butterscotch) because I couldn't find them there. Also, coming back, customs blinked a little when I declared ~$400 worth of Legos I'd picked up over there because of the exchange rate. Something along the lines of "Huh, why... Nevermind."
That is awesome.
what's candy corn? that slayed me.
Hey, it's a legitimate question! I've been plucking up the courage to ask Seanan for weeks, since it came up in another post. Now I no longer have to, which is just as well as I'm fairly sure I wouldn't be able to buy it here.

seanan_mcguire

6 years ago

seanan_mcguire

6 years ago

Seanan, did you happen to take any Australian chocolate (sorry I just cannot bring myself to call it candy) back with you? Things like Flakes and Violet Crumbles. Someone gave George Martin Tim Tams at the kaffeeklatsche, but he didn't seem to take to them as we had hoped he might.
If she didn't, you can get the British versions of them in San Francisco, right near Borderlands. I don't know about Violet Crumbles, but you'd expect Flake bars to be the same everywhere, no?

oreouk

6 years ago

aiglet

6 years ago

tintiger

6 years ago

seanan_mcguire

6 years ago

I lol'd when I read "What's candy corn?" and I probably would have lol'd if I had been there.
I did very well at keeping a straight face.

I self-rewarded with candy corn.
Don't you realize that Candy Corn has no native predators in Australlia? What happens if some of your Candy Corn gets loose, and is able to breed and establish a colony? Australia will be overrun with Candy Corn within three years!
You're welcome.
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