These may not be inconceivable or qualify as weird but:

Back in 98-99 I brought back a few switchblades from Germany. A friend brought a mace back fom Europe around the same time.

Anything interesting out there?

11/13/2014 12:10:24 PM

Recently, I made it all the way from the dominican republic to JFK with a 80% full bottle of water if my backpack side pocket. It wasn't until I was going to catch my connecting flight that I realized I had left it there.
Not weird...just not supposed to happen.

11/13/2014 12:16:41 PM

Only weird because of the context, but the wife and I brought back several bags of coffee from Central America (Costa Rica)
We'd been warned that coffee is a red flag for costums agents and that we would almost certainly be stopped and thoroughly searched once they saw it.
They waived the entire plane through when we disembarked. I could have brought a whole case of Cuban Cigars through with me.

Also i brought back a sword from Scotland.

[Edited on November 13, 2014 at 12:18 PM. Reason : ]

11/13/2014 12:17:49 PM

vest packed with heroin from thailand.

11/13/2014 12:23:08 PM

several pounds of feces.

11/13/2014 12:27:22 PM

^^so tuff.

11/13/2014 12:55:07 PM

Quote :

"Only weird because of the context, but the wife and I brought back several bags of coffee from Central America (Costa Rica)"

we brought 8 bags back with us earlier this year and didn't think twice about it...no one said anything to us

11/13/2014 2:42:37 PM

This was 7 years ago. Several expats told us coffee was a popular item that drug mules used to cover the smell and throw off drug sniffing dogs.
The owner at our last villa told us the same thing and gave us a few ziploc freezer bags to keep in our luggage in case we get stopped and they cut open the packages.

Not me, but my buddy's very naive dad is on a watch list for any federal customs and security agents. He was flying home from Mexico and was in the terminal waiting for his flight. A shopkeep at one of the kiosk was trying to get him to buy a case of Cuban cigars, but he refused and kept telling the guy he was going back to America and couldn't bring Cubans home.
That's when the shopkeep told him that since he was in the terminal and in a duty-free are that he could buy them and take them home legally, so the dad bought a box, stuck it in his carry on and flew home.
When he got to customs in the US he declared the cigars and was immediately detained. The agents let him go after they shredded the whole box in front of him and stuck his name on a watch list.
Now every time he flies he can't get through security without getting flagged, searched and having to unpack his whole suitcase in front of a TSA agent.

11/13/2014 3:02:42 PM

I brought a few Cubans back home from the Bahamas. Maybe customs were lax because it was a cruise though.

11/13/2014 3:17:01 PM

they were probably lax because you smuggled them up your butthole.

11/13/2014 3:19:07 PM

'twas the smelliest, most foul tasting cigar ever

11/13/2014 3:21:37 PM

bought a half pound of green tea in NYC Chinatown and took it back to Raleigh. I thought for sure they'd at least see what it was but nope. Could have been a brick of weed

11/13/2014 3:22:55 PM

i didn't realize you went through customs flying from NYC to Raleigh.

11/13/2014 3:24:49 PM

mi nino

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11/13/2014 3:36:04 PM

Cool.

11/13/2014 3:57:26 PM

my 19 inch fuschia phallis I affectionately refer to as the "Purple Penetrator"

It's ebola-free, so Customs Took no issue when they scanned it with their thermal goggles.

And yes, I did bring it international, so this step was required.

11/13/2014 4:46:19 PM

Quote :

"Also i brought back a sword from Scotland."

Taking a sword through customs isn't illegal is it? Just as long as you check the bag and don't take it in carry on luggage?

11/13/2014 5:04:39 PM

10 boxes of swisher sweets and Dutch masters while flying to visit a buddy in Costa Rica. I think it may have been approaching the limit for tobacco? Customs guy looked at them and just waived me through.

Another friend was flying to visit the same friend in Costa Rica with a bag of some kind of special compost and like 2lbs of quartz crystals (guy is into organic farming and shamanic crystal energies, etc). They confiscated the compost, apparently they try to prevent foreign soil microbes/fungus, etc from entering the country. Makes sense IMO.

11/13/2014 5:21:07 PM

Knives and weed

11/13/2014 5:31:47 PM

I was flying through Germany once during the winter and apparently I had enough munitions residue on my gloves to set off their alarms...oops.

11/13/2014 5:52:01 PM

1000 kilograms of ebola

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11/13/2014 5:53:38 PM

That seems like an excessive amount of ebola tbh.

11/13/2014 6:01:00 PM

I've got a friend who regularly takes pot brownies with him when he flies. The only time he didn't take them was on a recent international flight to Paris. I find this practice to be a bit risky...but I guess it's much less risky than bringing straight-up pot.

11/13/2014 6:01:29 PM

Not a customs issue, but the fuckers in amsterdam *seemed* pretty close to not letting me get on the plane to come home and I still have no idea why - pulled me out of line and asked me the same god damn questions over and over for a good 30 minutes

[Edited on November 13, 2014 at 6:13 PM. Reason : ]

11/13/2014 6:12:18 PM

I used to bring coffee back from Puerto Rico every time I went. Not exactly a foreign country but I don't think coffee is going to raise any red flags for US customs.

11/13/2014 6:38:41 PM

This thread lead me to google something involving "customs"

Google, in it's infinite fucking wisdom, thinks customs and costumers are the same word. No, it didn't say "we're including this term" or "did you mean" - it just threw that shit in there as if it's what I was looking for. Why the fuck am I having to start using search operators to weed out words for such a simple search? GOD DAMMIT

[Edited on November 13, 2014 at 6:49 PM. Reason : ]

11/13/2014 6:49:10 PM

Maybe you suck ass at google

http://i.imgur.com/Yv5n32f.png
http://i.imgur.com/x0zfsYI.png

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11/13/2014 6:52:25 PM

I brought a donkey jawbone back form Peru, where it is used occasionally as a musical instrument (you hit it and the teeth rattle. Peruvians are not creative about their instruments. The national music making device is a wooden box with a hole in it called "the box"). Anyway, it seemed like a weird item, I needed a weird item for my dad, and it wasn't expensive.

American customs didn't care about it at all, but on my way out of Peru it aroused quite a bit of suspicion. I had to take it out of my luggage twice (no small feat, since my luggage was full to bursting with gifts and a donkey jawbone is big and oddly shaped), and the head agent inspected it in a back room for about twenty minutes. Meanwhile, they had let the guy ahead of me through with no problem, and he had a bag of giant knives. They let me through in the end, though.

11/14/2014 2:51:10 AM

4 things at 4 different times:

1) Finally picked up a custom Katana while in central japan (travel there alot for the Navy). Went through a crazy Japanese security screening process to validate it was not a historical samurai sword (xray/ mri like screening, had special customs paperwork).

2) Had a entire large suitcase full of Chu-hai, Japanese shochu, and other Japanese alcohol, no problem checking it in and going through customs

3) Did the same thing in Italy with wine and limoncello

4) brought back failed parts from one of my ships....lots of wires, metal disks, and odd shaped metal pieces. Because of the nature of the equipment I needed to bring them on with me (couldnt risk losing them or additional damage that would jeapordize failure analysis).....kinda forgot about the whole 'on an xray this WILL MOST DEF' look like a bomb....that was an extra 45 minutes explaining to foreign customs/security what all of it was (at least what I could put in not engineering/Navy speak)

11/14/2014 6:53:21 AM

I was flying from Wisconsin to NC and the airport security stopped me to inspect, rather meticulously, the 5 blocks of cheese I was bringing on board.

I thought that was odd.

11/14/2014 7:33:10 AM

customs isnt so much about what can damage a plane (weapons) but about damaging a country. This is why most customs dont care about alcohol. Its labeled and sealed normally. Typical tourist thing.

Same for swords/knives as long as they are checked. No danger to a plane or bringing into the country.

Cheese however, probably rates about the same as plants. Customs hates plants. Lots of agriculture restrictions on plants. Same for soil as someone said.

11/14/2014 8:19:45 AM

You gotta be careful with yo cheddar dawg.

11/14/2014 9:50:31 AM

Never taken anything interesting through customs but I did have an interesting one flying domestic. I was traveling for work and the place I was going had a Trader Joes, we didn't have one here yet and my wife and I loved their pumpkin pancake mix so I decided I would pick up a few boxes and bring it back. I never check a bag so I was going to carry them on and apparently it looked like liquid to the security person because I had to unpack my entire bag to show them it was pancake mix instead. I figured they thought it might be drugs since it was bags of powder but I guess powder looks like liquid to the x-ray machine.

11/14/2014 10:17:51 AM