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Published: March 24th 2007
Today I arrived in Auckland after my long 16hrs of flying (from Calgary to LA 3hrs and the 13hrs to Auckland). After having a long day of flying I was very excited to see Melissa and Hopper (my sister and her boy friend) but my excitment changed soon after stepping off the plane. Before even getting to customs I was stopped by an airport sercurity officer asking to see all of my paper work, then continued with a thousand questions about why I was in New Zealand, how long I was staying, how I made the money to get here, how long it took me to save, what I do, what my sister does...question after question, mean while people are stopping asking if they have to show her there pass port but no they dont just me. But finally she let me continue on to customs so again I start to get excited about getting to see my sister but then I have to stand in a long line at customs where they again question me when they see that I'm by myself and am staying for 2 months and I dont know the address to where I'm staying so that makes it worse but they then did stamp my passport and I thought ok now everything will go fine from here. Oh no it got way worse from there. I go to look for my bag and its not comming threw so I have to go report that its missing but I dont have my baggage tag because it was on my boarding pass that I gave up in La, so reporting my lost bag took some time so I was stressed about not having my bags and about not being able to go tell my sister why its taking me so long to come out. Then finally when I think I can go see her and tell her about my bag they question me again when they see me without my bags trying to leave the customs area so they send me to walk down the blue lane ( which at the time I had no idea what this ment) So I go and no one is there so I'm looking around thinking maybe I went the wrong way and I was lost. But this guy that works there comes up and asks me what I'm doing, but by this time I was so stressed about everything I burst into tears which made things worse so he got me to sit down and was asking me why I was getting so upset, so I tried explaining it all to him, then he takes my pass port and says he will be right back. So I'm left sitting there crying not understanding whats going on. When he comes back he starts to question me like crazy the same way I had been questioned 3 times before i had got to him. Then he starts taking apart my bag and going threw all my stuff ( and I mean everything, like taking stuff out of my wallet and reading threw pages in my journal and look in all the pages of my books and questioning the present I had for my sister and the mail I had for her boy friend) all this time he is not explaining to me why he is doing this so I felt like I had done something wrong and I did not understand what. Then he does drug tests on all of my stuff and asks me if I do drugs and stuff.I have never been asked so many questions. Its was horrible so by the time I finally got to my sister I had been in customs for like almost 2 hours since I had landed. So I get to her and burst into tears again and tell her what happend. Which is not how I wanted to see my sister for the first time after 6 months of not seeing her!
So that was my trip threw hell into New Zealand. The rest of my day was much better. I went to my sisters house (which is wonderful) Hopper had to work so me and my sister just spent the day togther hanging out and catching up. My bags arrived at 3 in the afternoon so I did not have to wait to long for them which was nice. Then that night we went to my friends Blake and Leahs house ( two people who I met in africa, who my sister became friends with as well when she got here) we had dinner there. It was so nice to see them and see there new house. I went to bed pretty early cuz I was pretty tired from my crazy day!
So note to anyone that this might happen to...its not something against you they just do ramdom cheacks and it just so happend to be me and beacuse I was alone stressed and upset it only made matters worse.I do not have good luck with airports I decided but atleast I have good storys to tell and if it ever happends again I will know what to do and I will be a whole lot less stressed about it. I'm becomming a more and more experienced traveler and I'm not even 20 yet!
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Sara N
non-member comment
Aww
Sorry to hear your airport experience was not pleasant. Hope things are goin better now. Miss you already :)