Here's one from me just to warm things up.
This past weekend, I attended a child's birthday party and a guy named Osama made some small talk with me about my vacation trip to Saudi Arabia last year. He asked what it was like going back after all this time and given how much things have changed in the culture. He had lived in Jeddah for 2 years in the 2010s so he was familiar with the strict rules in The Kingdom.
I told him that the first culture shock was getting off the plane and going through immigration. I already had my tourist visa but I still had to show my passport and provide fingerprints, etc.
The border security agent was a female. That was a shock to me since historically, women were not allowed to have public facing roles like this where they would have to interact with random members of the public.
She was fully covered so that was "normal" in my book. And she spoke decent English so that was helpful.
All my paperwork was in order so all I needed to do to enter the country was provide my fingerprints. This is where I had a problem.
The fingerprint machine was one of these ones where you place your fingers on the glass and it scans them.
Left and Right thumbprints, no problem. But the fingers, they wanted all four fingers per hand, read together at the same time. This was next to impossible. Especially for my right hand with my Aggie Ring on it.
The scanner glass was small, maybe 4 inches wide and you needed to get all 4 fingertips down at the same time. After a couple of failures, the border guard lady asked me to try some hand sanitizer to see if that improved the reading. It didn't help much.
I must have tried about 10 times for my left hand and 20 times for my right hand to get all 4 fingers read at the same time. Every iteration, it would tell you which of your 4 fingers were read successfully and which one(s) failed. It reminded me of that old game "Mastermind" where you tried to match all 4 pegs and you'd get clues about which guesses of the 4 were correct.
https://www.mercari.com/us/item/m58865595343If you've got your Aggie Ring on and you want to play along at home, try to put your 4 fingers together. I wind up with kind of a Mork from Ork - Nanu Nanu which was not acceptable.
If you get cute and try to just curve your hand and bring your fingers together, they're at too much of an angle to read the fingerprints on the scanner. Eventually, after more hand sanitizer and more attempts, I decided to use my left hand to squeeze my fingers on my right hand together into the correct form to get read by the scanner.
When the fingerprint reading was finally all finished, I breathed a sigh of relief and so did the border guard lady. Now onward to baggage claim and customs.
They X-rayed all my stuff and sent me on my way relatively easily. Next was negotiating the taxi scammers.
Anyway, re-telling this story reminded me that we've got folks out here acting like the USA deporting illegal aliens is a criminal act. Meanwhile, many of us have jumped though a lot of hoops to visit other countries that these folks have not gone through to enter our country. I'm curious about what your stories are.
