Yeah, some people do get Alaska and Hawaii confused with the islands just below Texas - they are actually called Canada, right?appleman2006 wrote:Kind of feeds in the generally accepted thinking up here in Canada that geography outside of the borders of your 48 states is not taught very well. I bet there are people in your country that believe Alaska and Hawaii exist as islands just below Texas.
I think you're giving him too much credit. He didn't seem to know what a transit visa is. His questions focused on what I had been doing in East Germany, and I would have been arrested if I went into East Germany. I lived in West Berlin, which was crawling with spies for all sides, and he asked me no questions at all about what I was doing in Berlin, what kind of work I did as a computer scientist, etc.appleman2006 wrote:On a more serious note there is at least a slight chance that the border guard was intentionally playing dumb just to really test out the possibility that in fact Bootstrap may have been an agent for some foreign eastern power. 1988 was just after the end of the cold war after all and border guards do use some weird ways to get at facts at times.
When I say Berlin was crawling with spies ... I played flute and penny whistle for a Scottish Country Dance group led by an American working for counterespionage - he interviewed spies suspected of working for the other side. When I landed in the hospital, the guy in the bed next to mine was a spy studying East German technology. You bumped into spies in everyday life in Berlin. I've never lived anywhere else where that happened.