Comment by arethuza
10 years ago
I have no idea - but I've traveled to a lot of places and in terms of friendliness of reception at the border the only place that was worse involved communists and large crew-serviced machine guns (NB crossing into Yugoslavia in the late 1980s by train from Italy).
Edit: For the avoidance of doubt, I really like the US as a place to visit both for business and vacation, but the experience at the border can leave a lot to be desired.
I'm a US citizen and I don't like having to return to the US from abroad. Sometimes you are lucky and get a border guard that actually acts like a human being, even a human being doing a mostly boring job, but many times you get power-tripping jerks. I often travel with my partner, who is a green card holder, so I get to see that whole barrel of nonsense as well. In airports without the new expedited entry system (forget what it is called) we often have to wait upwards of 2-3 hours to get through an immigration checkpoint.
I kind of doubt that your memory is correct. In late 80s you would see police and toll officers on Yugoslavian border crossings generally armed with pistols. Army did "protect" border, but I can't think of a place where they would be anywhere close to normal border crossing and they certainly did not have crew serviced machine guns there. Both sides used to have bunkers so maybe you meant those?
Otherwise getting across wasn't difficult, just annoying because of long columns of cars. It was worse for us locals, because there was general and usually correct assumption that we were smuggling something.
I can easily think of worse recent experiences (USA, India...).
Nope - I can remember it quite vividly.
Train from Trieste to Ljubljana - stops in the middle of nowhere. After an hour or so troops turn up and surround the train, I remember watching them assemble the heavy machine gun and point it in the general direction of our carriage (mind you, the soldiers involved looked completely bored, so I didn't feel that threatened).
A chap who looked like a border guard came through with people who looked like officers (and who were in a supremely bad mood). Much shouting, waiving of pistols and people looking genuinely scared. After another couple of hours train continues on its way with everyone very puzzled.
No idea what it was about and my traveling companions hadn't encountered anything like that there before and subsequent border crossings in the next few days (e.g. Yugoslavia -> Hungary) were completely uneventful.
I can date it pretty well as it was about a week before the Piper Alpha disaster in the North Sea - I'm from the North East of Scotland and was worried that people I knew might have been involved. So it was about the 1st July 1988.