Well travelled


I’m applying for Global Entry, to make it easier to get through queues at American airports, even though I find the concept of throwing money at problems like this somewhat objectionable. (I tend to think airport immigration should be uniformly inconvenient for everyone (except kids and the elderly and handicapped; they have a greater claim to easy transit through lines than some salaryman armed with a corporate credit card), and not something you can buy your way out of, but then when you have to keep going through immigration again and again, your principles can shift a bit.)

Anyway, part of the process (if you’re British) is to fill in a form on a UK government website, pay £42 (an arbitrary amount that is clearly in homage to Douglas Adams and his view on bureaucracy) and then get a alphanumeric code to take to a US government website, and fill that in along with a whole bunch of other stuff, and then pay $100 (perhaps because Americans like round numbers or because they could never claim Douglas Adams as their own) and then go and get interviewed by an Immigration officer, who (I assume) then presents you with a golden ticket so in the future you can skip lines.

One part of the “other stuff” is every country you’ve visited in the last five years, except the US, Canada and Mexico. I’ve been to at least ten countries in that time, although it gets harder to track because neither Portugal nor Hong Kong stamp your passport if you’re me.

It’s also slightly galling to realise that there are entire pages in my passport that are just covered in stamps from the same airport. I started this post with a nice picture of some of the many times I’ve been to Bangkok; I have ten of Japan’s unlovely grey QR code stickers in my passport, and almost uncountable (22) blurred, faint or scribbled US stamps – I’m not sure why, but often they don’t have a date stamp, so there’s a date scribbled in biro for when you need to Get Back Out Again. Including this set of beauties:

Then again, the grander the passport stamp, the more likely it is that you’re going somewhere with a less-than-high-quality government. Or at least that’s how I console myself. If you received a gold embossed visa with an oil painting of the president of the country you were visiting, you’d be right to assume somebody had their priorities a bit skew-whiff.

Actually, that reminds me of another oddity: Immigration officials who remark that I’ve been to a lot of countries. Are they making small talk? Do most of the passports they see only have one or two stamps in them? Or do I look so suspicious that they’re seeing if they can catch me out?

Oh dear. Maybe that doesn’t bode well for my application…


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