How a moist towelette almost landed me in jail

"A-" was just reading this and just reminded me that I never followed up on the moist towellete story that happened right after I landed in Beirut. So here goes. This is a bizzarre tale that really is true, I just did not have time to write it up in Beirut.

So, I have my carry on bags with me as I am heading to passport control in Beirut. I had this large sand-colored shoulder bag, and my black laptop case, with a side-pocket where I carried my passport and tickets. It was the most accessable pocket I had.

Now remember that I was quite careful to not have anything in Hebrew, Israeli, or Jewish in any of my bags, on my person. . . I left some stuff in Heidelberg because they were books that dealt with the Holocaust, just because I did not want to have them with me on the off chance that my bags would be searched on my way in to Lebanon. (They were not.)

I get to the passport control window and a rather bored and tired looking Lebanese soldier looks at me and asked me for my passport. That was expected. So I reach in to the side pocket of my computer bag to get my passport and while pulling it out, two of those little moist towelettes just seem to fly out of the bag with my passport. It was weird. One of them fell on the floor right next to my feet, and the second landed on the counter of the passport control window. Now it would really not have been any big deal, and I never noticed that they were there before.

It turns out that these little moist towlettes were ones I just had in my bag from my trip to Israel last summer. Thay were in little blue packages that had the El Al logo (El Al is the official airlines of the Israel) and an Israeli flag.

Anyway, I quicky snatch the towlette that is on the counter, and almost had a heart attack when I realized what had happened, and I stepped on the one on the floor and then picked it up. As it turns out the guy saw what had happened, but he must have not noticed what it was, and I went in to the baggage claim area where, as you might have read, only one of my bags came. Once in there, I crumpled the towlettes inside a bunch of train tickets that were still in my pocket from Germany and stuck the whole mess in to a garbage can near the conveyor belt.

That was genuinely one of the scariest two seconds of my life.