Coming in Kuwait Airport, I had one bag that I checked in and my briefcase, passed immigrations and waited for my bag to come out on the belt. There were a few late night flights arriving on Jazeera as well as our flight so it was packed. There were lines at the bag scanning machine, we placed our bags, mine came out first and I gave my coworker his bag and I said hello to the Kuwaiti guy standing behind the screen.

As I was about to pick up the larger bag, the customs guy spoke to the other customs guy right behind him behind another counter. As I was walking around about to head out the other guy said hello and asked for my passport. I asked him which bag he wants to see, the next is towards the left so he asked me to step towards the right slightly away from people. He opened my passport and said hello Marzouq, I said hello and asked him which bag he wants to search, he seemed nice enough. He then said, he doesn’t want to search my bags and thanked but was wondering what was in my pockets, I took out both my phones in my right pocket, so the he asked about the left one and I pulled out my wallet. He then said sorry for the inconvenience but sometimes guys sneak in small bottles of alcohol in their pockets, and they just take them and throw them without doing anything about the guy. He was very courteous, and I spoke to someone about this today and he said they do this because they know the person isn’t selling it, and since its personal use they just does it and let the person go, they don’t want to embarrass the person which is pretty decent of them. It was something new for me, I don’t mind when they search and I’m happy they are doing their jobs at 1 am.