Alright, I have a question for all you jugglers who travel a lot.
The last time I went to England, I was stopped by the security people who scan your bags/shoes/backpacks ect... They looked at my N8 juggling balls and asked me TONS of questions. They then like, swabbed them with this cloth or something, and put the cloth into this machine.......It took a long time, and they acted like I was some sort of terrorist.......How can I stop this from happening again? Does anybody know any tricks?
Once upon a time you only had to worry about seed-filled beanbags, nowadays any filling could be suspicious. N8s are made by Gballz and he has done plastic filled balls in the past (I have some), so maybe you could get plastic filled N8s. Still suspicious, but at least they're not organic and wouldn't be destroyed if you tried to enter New Zealand or Australia.
Buy some small stage balls maybe, they're hollow and filled with nothing.
Can you not just put them in your hold luggage rather than your hand luggage? That's normally fine. I wouldn't like to take beanbags in my hand luggage, but I did take clubs on one occasion.
I have travelled with my seed-filled MMX balls in the hand luggage, but only within Europe. No problems so far. I always put the clubs in the hold luggage because I have heard there could be problems getting them through security.
Cedric Lackpot - - Parent #
Either dont't travel, or don't travel with N8s. Things which are hard to identify are necessarily going to get flagged as suspicious, simply because it is unknown whether they represent a threat or not, so they are treated as such until they prove otherwise.
I suspect the swab is to take a sample of any trace of anything volatile which is then popped in a spectrometer for quick analysis and matching against a database of substances known to be threatening.
This happened to me on the way back from the Dutch about ten years ago. They discovered nothing and sent me on my way, despite the whip in my luggage, and the ancient wrap of speed which was lurking unbeknownst to me in the bottom of the bag I dug out of the loft to travel with! I don't think they care so much about neatsfoot oil or dodgy white powders as they do about explosives and their precursors, biological agents, and so on. Same goes for juggling balls - once they prove to be non-threatening they just move on and mildly hassle someone else.
AAAAAAA!!!! "Don't travel with N8s"?!!?!? What would I do while I'm waiting for people who take WAY to long to use the bathroom on the plane? What would I do when the movie that's playing is annoying and I'm bored out of my mind?
Little Paul - - Parent #
Read a book
Or maybe I could yell in the line to the security thing "THIS IS NOT A BOMB. NO NEED TO WORRY."
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