Borderless World??

We went for a quick post New Years trip down to the US of A.  This required a trip to the bank to retrieve our passports. Since the events of 9/11 Canadians have to produce a passport for entry into the States. Prior to that all you needed was smile :), be reasonably sober and able to produce a valid photo ID.  I once used my Block Buster video card to slip down to Bellingham, Washington for a beer.  With our dog eared passports in hand, we sat in the US line waiting to talk a customs officer. Bored,  I got to thinking about all the factors we face to cross a border into another country.

We have crossed a lot of borders in the last ten years and faced dozens of surly customs officers. Except for one or two exceptions, surly customs officers have been the most consistent factor we have found when crossing borders. There must be a school somewhere that specializes in giving customs officials those sneering looks of suspicion and unspoken accusations of smuggling. 





Surly (adverb), Surliness (noun): irritably sullen and churlish in mood or manner
Sullen (adjective): gloomily or resentfully silent, repressed
Churlish ( adjective): marked by a lack of civility or graciousness

I think you get the idea. The prize for surliest is awarded to? Ah, too many to fairly award it. Although the borders where custom officials carried big, scary looking  rifles, dramatically enhanced our experience and perhaps coloured our perceptions of the levels of surliness we were subjected to.

Another factor faced is the valuable time spent to cross borders. Anywhere from under a minute to 10 hours. The clear winner for the most time spent crossing a border was from Mongolia to Russia. To be fair, the train we were traveling on,  required a complete wheel replacement due to the different track gauge size between the two countries.  While this was going on, we were left to wander around a quaint little Russian town, that doubled as a giant souvenir shop. The winner for the least stressful crossing was from Estonia to Sweden. We arrived on ferry from Tallinn to Stockholm. Disembarking from the ferry, we had passports at the ready. We quickly found ourselves outside on the dock, not seeing a soul who looked like a customs officer. We kind of freaked a little, thinking that we had somehow bypassed some form of control point and that we were illegal immigrants on Swedish soil. Not to worry, but we did have to deal with surly taxi driver that took us to our hotel. But that's another story and fodder for another blog.

There was a brief thought back in the late sixties, when peace and love was rampant, that in the future borders would become non-existent. Sadly, we are no closer today to a borderless world and the chance of that happening in the future is about as doubtful as finding a friendly, smiling border official at any border crossing. But, lets for a moment imagine a world without borders, what would we do with all those border officials?  Armed taxi drivers perhaps.


 Visas, a legitimate way to monitor people entering your county or a cash grab. Stay tuned.