Clearing Customs

I didn't have time to write in the last post about our experience with customs at the Almaty airport. Remember all that cash I wrote about in an earlier post? Well, we had to declare all of it at customs. We'd heard horror stories from people who were really intimidated by the customs agent because you have to count out all the money in front of whoever is passing by and that there were big guys lurking around making you feel unsafe. Our customs experience went like this: there were two skinny Kazakh guys in a smallish room who look like they had recently graduated high school. We gave them our declaration forms and they started making small talk about where we were going while looking over our form. Then the boss came in--all 5'6" of him. He was a little older. He looked over our forms and started asking about Texas. Turns out he had been in McAllen for 'training' (?) last year. Anyway, he says, "So, should we count the money or not?" Jim told the boss he could count it if he wanted to, that we had been completely accurate (even down to the euros we had left after eating lunch in Frankfurt). The boss said that maybe we should give a little gift to the younger agents since they were new to the job. So, our first bribe! Right at that moment a man came in (German?) and had some watches to declare. He was in Almaty on business and had a few watches to give as gifts--the inexpensive kinds that companies give out with their logo on them. The boss was very interested in the watches and figured they were worth about $500 each. Real value, probably about $7 each. Anyway, he got really involved in the German watch guy and Jim and I played really dumb about the 'gift' and the young Kazakh agent started stamping our forms so we got out of there without having to count out our money or pay a bribe! It was the perfect bureaucratic storm. Whew!!