Geeky Chic

I may be done visiting countries that border Colombia. 
There should be an entry about giant tortoises here.  But no,
that’s not what you’re going to get.  Why?

Well, today, I really had to use the restroom, so the friends with whom
I travelled allowed me to go through the passport checkpoint in
Guayaquil first.  I went through without a hitch, but then two
narcotics officers gestured me to their table, and asked to see my
luggage.  I complied, and they rifled through my bags, and of
course, found nothing.  I thought that I was done, but then one of
them said, “Come with me,” and off we went through one set of doors, up
a flight a stairs, past the AA Admirals Club, and through another set
of doors to the officers’ office (somewhere along the way he collected
another narcotics officer).  Keep in mind that my friends were
behind me at the passport checkpoint, so they did not see where I went,
and I had no idea what the officers had in mind for me.  After we
arrived in the office, one officer took down my passport number in a
log book and started to fill out a form.  I saw a computer screen
with an abdominal X-ray, and asked, in a Spanish accent,
“Radiation?”  “Si.”  Then they X-rayed me, and the screen
just revealed a straight spine (that was my first fleeting thought, “Damn, I have a nice spine.”) and
the underwire of my bra, so they let me go, to my great relief. 
When I shakenly reported this to my cabinmate during the trip, he said,
“No big deal, now you know how it feels to be a black man in America.”

They also pulled aside another one of my friends for the X-ray, but she
freaked out a little more than I did about the prospect of being taken
to the backroom, so she brought along the managing editor of the
Internet edition of this Mexican newspaper,
as her translator (he was in our tour group).  The editor asked
the officer if this was standard procedure, and he replied, “No, we
rarely do this because it’s rude.”

So, we really have no idea why we fit the “profile” of cocaine mules.