Balkan Borders Part 2

My heart started ?to race, do I leave our stash on the bus? Do I try to pull it out and eat it? do I run? I just acted normal even though my heart beat was through the roof. They start asking for adults and to leave the children on the bus, if only I had the forethought to bring a child! My mind starts to race, leaving the stash on board and hoping for a light bus search, or pray for incompetence in customs officials at 2 in the morning and hope they skim over your bags.

Boy did i bet wrong, I took the weed with us out into the warehouse to the side of the bus, grabbed our bags and put them next to some similar looking Caucasian ?folk and hoped for the best, yawning and pretending to be a annoyed and tired traveler upset by the process, all while focusing mentally on the 10 grams of dirt weed wrapped up in = inside a peanut bag, inside a vacuum thermostat for coffee. God fucking speed is what i thought, we at this point of searching, pretending like there isnt a multitude of illegal substances in each of those bag is the only option, so again i yawn and keep a low face. Little did I know that my dimmed eyes, coupled with my stench and red eyes, led to a heart wrenching search and seizure.

It started out slow and methodically, two border guards started at both ends of the open baggage line and made rudimentary searches of different bags. One guard who looked like a roll of stuffed sausage, the other twig man stuffed into an oversized Albanian border guard uniform. Making their way down the line, moving things in bags but not really digging to much. The stick figure and sausage both made it to our bags at the same time, and like a bad movie, I saw twiggy look me in the eyes and have a moment of realization, it started slowly, the twig digging into my clothes and finding my beautiful U.S. cannabis company hat. He looked at it and said “bad word, bad words” to the cries of my rebuttal that it was a Washington company. He just shook his head and continued to toss around my belongings. He kept asking what I brought, and that I should just tell him about it. As this was going on, I watched the pulled pork special inch closer through Durban's bag toward the coffee mug with the green in it. As tiwggy was asking for another admission of guilt, I saw sausage pull out the mug and have Durbin open it, my heart dropped, all the thoughts of Albanian jail and the resulting international incident played through my mind. My heartbeat stopped as i pretended not to watch her hand it to him. The thundering in my heart could be heard all the way to Greece it felt like. I stared back at my bag and tried to focus on the twig still browsing the contents of my side pouches, beat after beat after beat after beat.

Nothing. They find the CBD hash in my day bag, the stupid ten euro gram of shit hemp hash i bought in Vienna, he calls it chocolate, i plead out no, its CBD, its legal, no THC no THC, CBD Legal all over. But he says this is my problem. He continues to search my bag though. At this point the guard finds the grinder found on a park bench in Prague in her pack and asks her to come over to table for further inspection.

Even though the Hemp Hash was legal, the argument made was that an Albanian court would decide the truth. I was then offered to come speak reasonably in the back room of the guard house. I immediately had a jolt scare as I realized there was a crummy metal bunk bed and mattress and no cameras in this back room. The movie hostel jumped to the front of my head, but luckily I was not forced to deal with that kind of horror. The guard merely asked me if I wanted to have a judge figure out the situation or if I wanted to show some “respect” to the border guards that evening. It started out at 100$ but because I only had 100 dollar bills it came out to 400, I had to make sure his partner was taken care of ass well.

It sucked but beats missing my bus or working my way through the Albanian justice system. Funny enough they missed both the pipe and flower. So as we drove away I lit up a fresh bowl and gave the middle finger to Albania as I feared for my life smoking down the razor back roads into Macedonia.