Zollkontrrolle

I arrived at the Köln/Bonn airport after a fairly uneventful flight. (Thank you, thank you, thank you to the flight attended that let me move my seat way from the man who needed a seat belt extender and couldn’t put the armrest down. That would have been seven very, very long hours.)

K was there to meet me and it seemed like the trip would conclude as easily as it started. All I needed to do was pick up the cats and we were off. Right? Wrong. Enter the German custom office (Zollkontrrolle). After locating the cats – which took some time and required that I sneak past a pack of airport security officers back into the baggage claims area – I was told that we had to pick up the cats in the cargo terminal. To get to the terminal we had to circle the airport several times. Once there was it took some convincing (via the one person we could find who spoke some English), calls back to the main terminal, and a thorough search of my person and the car before I was escorted past this check point Charlie. From there I had followed a security car to the cargo claim area. Even though the cats were there I was told that I wasn’t allowed to pick them up. To clear customs the cats needed to be seem by a vet, but because it was national holiday (the day of Germany’s reunification) the vet was not in.

Eventually the customs office convinced a vet to approve them over the phone and after one more stop at the customs office (mind you this was a completely different from all the custom offices I’d previously talked to) the papers were signed. All I had to do was pay 8 Euro per cat and, two and half hours after landing, I was finally free to leave the airport.