Every passenger was taken separately to a small table, where a security official would interview him or her. After a while of waiting, the turn came to me. This not being the first time I went through something like this, I thought I was rather calm and comfortable in the situation. However, the security official interviewing me - an older Dutch man with a very strong accent, that, even for a fluent German speaker like me, sometimes was a bit hard to understand - held onto me for rather long, and after a while, he started asking the same questions over and over again: how I could afford the ticket, even though I was just a student; why I had Israeli and Russian visas in my passport; why I had a Russian boyfriend even though I was Swedish; 

Soon, the first security official brought a female colleague, and asked me to come with them. They herded me downstairs into a large hall, where the female official took me into a booth and searched me. It turned out that what might have evoked the most suspicion in the male official was the fact that I was wearing socks in my sandals. When we came out of the booth, he asked his colleague several times if she really hadn't found anything in my socks ...

Then, the turn came to searching through my luggage. The female official seemed to be rather civilised, and just doing her job, whereas her male colleague seemed to find some kind of perverse pleasure in it. While with great interest searching through all my things, particularly the parts of it containing menstrual pads and tampons, as well as condoms, day-after pills and so on, he kept making comments that were half 'funny', half malicious. When I didn't laugh at his stupid jokes, he complained about me to his colleague in Dutch, assuming that I didn't understand the language.

Still, no matter how hard they tried, they couldn't seem to find anything strange in my luggage (apart from a harmless little kheffiyeh and a Fidel-keychain), and had to release me again. After overcoming the moment of annoyment, I figured that I could have spent all that time sitting around and being bored, waiting for the check-in to begin, and that this actually had been more interesting. Also, the fact was now established that if there actually would be a terrorist attack on that very plane I was boarding, I would be the main suspect, as they had entered my details into their records. Heh heh ...

Still, no hijackers appeared to have snuck onto the plane, and I slept and studied myself through the long hours. People like Neil Gaiman, who write novels on their flights between the UK and the US, must have a great ability to concentrate, and to ward off all those nervous older men who keep trying to converse.

Anyway, I had hardly managed to get out of the immigration and baggage reclaim section, when something suddenly threw itself at me, almost knocking me over, and started kissing me wildly.