bio-medical weapons and illegal border crossings

Yesterday we almost got arrested as violent G8 summit bio-terrorists for crossing three national borders visa-less and with two bottles of A-negative blood in tow.

It had been a busy morning. Week, in fact, though not for me so much as Wilken, who’d broken his knee in what we will, for insurance purposes, refer to here as a sporting injury. In fact it was rather an unfortunate dance-floor incident in which someone had thrown him the imaginary dance-floor ball: he dribbled it for a bit without incident but then had somewhat misguidedly (after a biertje or four) attempted to put it through his legs.

And so we found ourselves some days later driving with a friend to the clinic in Aachen, where Wilken was to be seen by the unfortunately named orthopaedic surgeon Herr Doktor Messer (messer in German meaning ‘knife’). In the meantime he’d been given a pair of crutches (which we’d affectionately dubbed Jimmy sticks, in honour of the South Park character), and stuck in the knee with a pair of needles that turned into clear tubes that led to two bottles that progressively filled up with blood and other unidentified fluids. With no pocket large enough to conceal them, they dangled disconcertingly at belt height outside his jeans, frightening small children and the elderly. It was not the prettiest sight.

But underway we were to have the ghastly things removed. Now, given that the international G8 summit was to be held in a nearby German town, and the Schengen agreement (which permits EU citizens to travel freely across borders) had been suspended for security reasons, and that my British passport was being held at the Chinese Embassy in the Hague for visa application purposes, attempting a border crossing with said bottles of blood and a Dutch number plate may not have been the wisest endeavour.

Needless to say, we were singled out and pulled over at the border crossing into Germany by a pair of ruthless cops who insisted on unloading all of us and removing one leg of Wilken’s jeans to check that his blood bottles were in fact connected to his knee and not bio-medical weapons that happened to be sitting in his lap at a national security checkpoint. Then they asked for our passports and I was forced to hand over my conspicuously blue Australian one – without visa – for verification. Luckily, old Hans didn’t seem to be in the mood for catching illegal aliens today – evidently he was set on terrorists and queue jumpers just didn’t fit the bill. Luckily for me.

And the third national border? Well. Diesel’s cheaper in Luxembourg.