Immigration

It would be many years before we returned to Schiphol airport to explore Amsterdam, of course, at that moment while we were waiting, we did not know it.

I cannot remember the second part of the flight to Toronto, of course it was exciting, free booze again and in flight movies, but it was a long flight and a few hours of much needed catch up sleep were chased around an uncomfortable cabin.

The carousel seemed unwilling to give up our baggage, I'm sure everyone who is in some sort of rush feels that, we picked up our cases and followed the green line until it came to the immigration counter.

The line up was quite long, lots of foreign looking people of all shapes, colours and sizes. The man in front of us was South African, or Australian, a sort of strange, skewed English dialect, maybe he was from Wolverhampton...

Anyway, the Immigration Officer went through his checklist with him, paperwork, passport and then asked if he was bringing anything illegal into the country, the man said no, then the officer asked if he had any cheese or meats, again, the guy said no, then paused, and said he did have a sausauge sandwich in his bag.

We'd been waiting for eight months for this moment and we were stalled by a sausage butty.

A five minute discussion ensued, about the legality of a sausage sandwich as opposed to "meat" and even though the man said that his mum had made it for him, the Immigration Officer said that he could not bring it into Canada. The argument extended into a "what if I eat it now" situation and I could hear the line behind me shuffling and muttering, a crescendo of internal "for fucks sake" comments, muted and expressed with body language.

The contraband was surrendered and the man was allowed into the country, the Immigration officer smiled at the pair of us, asked the same questions and I was tempted, but not very much, to say I had a pigs head in my carry on baggage.

The paperwork was stamped, he waved us through and we were in Canada, after all that time, we were officially Landed Immigrants.