The loyal fans of our TV show are already asking on Facebook: “So where are the new episodes?”. While I have an unexpected burst of energy due to forced starvation and the stomach rumbling caused by taking Fortrans, I’m rushing to not disappoint the demanding public.
There isn't all that much left to tell.
Last time I forgot to mention that we also sent a postcard from Aqaba, for which we dropped by the post office. The Jordanian post office strikes you with its monotony: there is nothing, literally nothing there, except for the cashiers, huge rows of yellow P.O. boxes, and a few postcards, and the selection of the latter is extremely scarce. As for stamps, you can't choose them at all; whatever they give you is what you get. The visitors aren't exactly flocking there either. Curiously, to send a postcard to Europe, you need two stamps: one to pay for the inside of the country, and the other for the outside.
You can immediately see it's a purely state-run and formal institution: when I asked for a postcard like the one in the display case, I was informed that they were out of those, and the display case was locked, and opening it was not part of the procedure. Now compare that to our inventive Latvijas Pasts, where they sell damn near diapers by now, and people eager to stock up on household goods crowd into the central branch so hard that sometimes you have to wait an hour and a half, and the ticket machine shows about forty people ahead of you.
Let's return, however, to our sheep, that is, our departure from Eilat. Such athletic and agile boars like us managed to simultaneously drag two boxes with the bikes and the bags, and all because both have a convenient shape and handles, and we have unmeasured strength.
We were at the bus station long before the scheduled bus, but vaguely remembered the platform number, and hoped for the formation of the popular masses around it closer to time X. Oddly enough, the masses were in no hurry to form. I recalled that the same bus comes to the bus station twice: it picks up the prudent ones from the station, goes around the hotels, and then returns and picks up those who are lazier and more risk-taking. This time, for a change, we decided to join the prudent ones, but that didn't help us: for some reason, the bus didn't arrive at all at the first agreed-upon time, and we began to sink into a state of mild agitation, fortunately, far from as extreme as upon arrival and rushing for the Jett bus.
We reached the airport without incident, having admired once again the souped-up barbed wire on the border with Egypt: two rows and three meters high.
At the airport right near the entrance, and even before the check-in counter, we got into a line. It wasn't clear if this was where we needed to be, so Rybakov went to the check-in counter and back, and gave me some advice. When I tried to pull the same trick, I was met with an extremely burning glare from a female security officer, which I translated into verbal form with the words: “Where are you pushing, have you completely lost your mind?” and hastily retreated back into the line. A special guy working on the principle of a load balancer opened the ribbon of each line in turn (another pun intended) and let the end ones through based on the FIFO principle, while politely bowing to everyone with positive comments in Russian.
Sorry, of course, for the excess of English-language terminology, but my brain right now is once again partially shaped by the programmer's reality. The thing is, I went back to work, albeit part-time, because the rest of the time I am studying the quirks of my body and having heart-to-heart talks with various doctors. And although doctors are interesting and intelligent people, I would still like to reduce my interactions with them in the future.
Let's return, however, to that procedure which will soon begin in the temporal continuum of my tale, and about which many of you have heard my colorful and emotional stories.
Our turn finally came – a young, pretty and decently dressed girl (didn't see any other kind) disinterestedly flipped through our passports until she stumbled upon the stamp of crossing the Jordanian border. A lightbulb immediately went off for her here, and she called over a dark-skinned skinny guy, whom Sasha dubbed the “shift supervisor”.
This one got to work on us in earnest. Questions poured out like from a cornucopia.
What connects you? Are you friends?
What kind of a tourist club is it? How many years has it existed? How many years have you been in it? What do you do there? How many years have you known each other?
How old are your bicycles? Where were they bought?
Why did you specifically go to Jordan? Did you meet the locals? Did they give you anything?
I'm not asking just for the sake of it, a bomb can be in different shapes, you understand, right?
Do you have any weapons? A knife?
Rybakov did have a knife, which he good-heartedly confessed to, so as not to get hit with another hour of questions. The thing is, stories are not uncommon where at the border they interrogate you not for half an hour, and not even for an hour, but, for example, eight (with breaks) and in a separate room.
The interrogation, although extremely polite, was fast and harsh, the guy barely smiled. Good thing we were going through it together: I'm an anxious person, and it would have been uncomfortable for me alone, even though I had no guilt behind me, but this way at least sometimes we managed to relieve the tension with little jokes and exchanging glances.
After torturing us for about fifteen minutes, the guy led us to the scanner. The setup looked futuristic, like a particle accelerator : long and cylindrical in essence, but in places narrowing into polygonal shaped thickenings.
First they scanned our bags, then they asked us to open them, and pulled out the ill-fated cooking pot, the remains of the Joylent, and all sorts of other little things. These things were shoved into the scanner again, separately. Then they asked us to open the bicycles, pull them out (sic!) of the boxes, and ran a sniffing stick over them, which had a cotton swab on the end for catching particles. Then this cotton swab is used to analyze what they gathered for explosive substances content. With the sniffing stick they felt up not only the bags, boxes, bikes, but in places us too.
It's interesting that when the security officer was inspecting my things, the first aid kit didn't attract his attention at all, although if he had such an intention, he could have asked me an unpleasant question about where the prescription for the potent medications was, which I'm legally obliged to have when crossing the border. Fortunately, he didn't give a damn about it, and he immediately closed the first aid kit.
In the end, the guy was satisfied with the inspection, but said that some things would need to be set aside into a separate bag. The kind security gives out such bags, high-quality ones, with a cool inscription in white on a blue background “Airport Security” and a Star of David absolutely for free.
When, it would seem, everything was already behind us, I hear: “And I will ask you, Vladislav, to stay”. In English, and it’s hard to understand how they would have interrogated people who don't speak this language. Russian-speakers in Israel are a dime a dozen, of course, but there probably wouldn't have been any Latvians at the airport.
The guy started asking: “And what's this you got in your pocketses” In your carry-on? Is there any electronic equipment there? I was already starting to say that I don't carry any, but opening the backpack, I saw two phones and a camera there, which I had completely forgotten about, because I don't consider them equipment, I've grown so used to them.
At this point the girl from earlier ran up and started whispering something to the supervisor in Hebrew. Although I didn't speak a word of it, subsequent events showed that the translation was simple: “Not Vladislav, Alexander”. So I dodged a bullet: they kept Sasha there to jerk him around further, and I, finally, made my way to the coveted check-in counter. Here I must report that suspicious types like us are not allowed to walk around the airport alone: always under the supervision of a special agent. I had to drag the box alone, good thing at least the floor is slippery.
At check-in a little hidden trap awaited me: the thing is that usually I tape the bike bags into one with electrical tape, and only then check them in as luggage. Here, however, they were checked separately, marked with the mark of the beast (that is, a barcode was slapped on), and no further shenanigans with the bags can be performed! Are they really going to make me pay extra? After such intense interactions with security, I wasn't in the best of moods, and despite my usual non-confrontational nature, I was ready to argue a bit. Fortunately, you can always be a bit sneaky and say that the security guys forced me to split the bags into two, which is what I did.
The instances when I lie can be counted on one hand, but here I decided that it's practically not even a lie.
Then I went through another scanner, where they hardly jerked me around anymore, because my escort android-handler informed the female worker at the x-ray that I had been examined up and down, and posed no danger.
For about ten minutes I sat on a bench, waiting for Sasha to appear, and he did finally show up. Clean as a baby: without his huge backpack, which had all his warm clothes.Why was Sasha detained and what other humiliating procedures did they put him through? Where did the backpack go?
To preserve the pitiful remnants of suspense, I'll talk about that in the next part.