re: #131 Anymouse 🌹

I had a similar problem when I went to Brazil at fifteen. I was familiar with the principal of customs (having gone through the Canadian border over land) but not by air.

My mistake was checking my baggage all the way through: Lansing to Detroit, then LaGuardia, then helicopter commuter to JFK, then Rio, then São Paulo, then Araçatuba.

My baggage took a detour from LaGuardia to LAX, and it took over a month for Pan Am to find it and bring it to me. (My family there was stuck buying me clothes as well as school uniforms, they split the bill with my mother.)

Oh, man, that’s awful. Incidentally, I wanted to go to France, but the small company that did exchanges with my high school couldn’t work that out—only had home stays in Brazil and Japan. I chose Japan for reasons I still don’t understand. That was 1982.