How is the bus crossing into Canada?
The train is very preferable to the bus for border-crossing purposes. The agents treat you much better when you arrive on the train.
Here is how they do the bus: the bus stops at the border, and the driver gets out and puts all the luggage from under the bus on the curb outside the building. Sometimes you have to wait for other buses ahead of you in line before the driver can get the luggage out.
Then you have to wait, in the bus, until they assemble the agents inside to process the bus passengers. This can be a while too.
When the agents tell the driver they are ready, everyone gets off the bus with everything they have with them, you have to bring all of your belongings inside the building, and pick up your luggage at the curb on the way in.
You wait in line there and it's just like going through customs when you get off an international flight at an airport.
There are people on the bus from all over the world and many times they don't have the right visa documents and they have to go to immigration and fill out forms and pay fees and get interviewed. You have to wait for the people to get processed and sometimes one person can hold up the bus for 45 minutes.
Also sometimes there is someone with something questionable in their background and they get pulled aside and searched and this can take a long time and we wait for them too.
Many times someone doesn't make it and you lose a passenger at the border, who didn't have the proper ID etc. to be admitted.
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I know we have all had bad experiences at the border (I think Alan wins though - that sounds like a terrible one Alan!) but I cross a lot and it is only very occasionally that I get grilled. Haven't had to go to immigration for a long time. They go through phases where they step up security. They also have a form of strikes called "work to rule" I think which causes slowdowns. I think all the border guards are trained to not profile people, which means they are required to hassle a certain quota of innocent looking demographics.
The Amtrak clientele is different than the Greyhound clientele and the processing is faster and more civilized on the train.
The new thing that the agents are trained in is this extended questioning where they ask you a lot of questions about where you are going, who you will be with, what you do for a living, and repeat the questions different ways, it is a technique to see if you are sticking with your story or if you confuse the details, also no doubt a test to see if they get your back up.
Never get your back up at the border. Only answer the question they ask you, with the shortest possible answer. Do not volunteer information. Let them direct the interaction, only respond to them, do not initiate. Make sure you didn't skip anything on your customs form.
I think the fact that I cross the border a lot has influenced the way I present myself. I have a conservative look. I do not want to be hassled, I do not want to waste their time, but mostly I don't want to be interrogated because it gets me upset and resentful, and you must not get upset and resentful at the border! They have a lot of power to screw up your life. Alan was excluded from Canada for a year, if that happened to me it would be truly awful - my boyfriend is on that side of the border!