Americn Customs Border Patrol - otherwise known as ARSEHOLES!

Yesterday was interesting as we decided to take a day trip to the US to a city of Buffalo which we heard was the 2nd biggest city in New York State. So we drove the 2 hours down to the border expecting to get across relatively quickly. Anyway as we approached the booth both of us felt a strange feeling of impending doom. I wish we had been wrong!

Now I had found the previous night that Canadian immigration was very anal. Now I think they have just been overtaken by the US CBP guards! The border patrol guard had a look on his face of 'I wanna pick a fight with some dude' and unfortunately we were those dudes! Here are a snipit of some of the things he said -

'How long do you intend to stay' - Just one day
'Why for just on day' - Because its a day visit
'Why have you come here then?' - to go shopping in Buffalo
'Where" - errr Gap
"Where is that exactly in Buffalo' - we don't know
'Why' - because we havn't been there yet!
'I will ask you again where are you going' - Buffalo
'I will ask you again just one more time where are you going' - BUFFALO!
'So you are telling me you have come down to the US just for a day visit' - YES

At this point he told us to go to Bay One to be questioned further and finished on my funniest note -

'have a nice day and enjoy ya visit to the US' - Yeah right my arse like you meant that after having interrogated and spoken to us like shit for the last five minutes!

So we went into this very small room full of people and waited for nearly two hours. The funniest thing was we were pretty much the only white dudes in the entire room of about 20 people! There was Pakistanis, Bangladeshi's, Indians, Mexicans, you get the jest and here are two white boys! We felt like we were trying to illegally escape into the US like in the movies!

It turns out that they really really did not believe that we were going shopping in Buffalo. But after searching the car, interrogating Kev further, phoning his uncle up and contemplating speaking to Kev's girlfriend they decided to let us go!

Now as we approached Buffalo I realised quickly why they didn't believe us. For a city of 330,000 its DEAD! Seriously it looks like a city in serious decline with empty buildings everywhere in the main CBD standing next to rising skyscrappers. Its really weird like it was a ghost town in the old movies but with slightly higher buildings!

We realised quickly that there wasn't a lot of shopping to be done in Buffalo so we headed to Niagra Falls where they are shopping malls.

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