Poker Chip Bewilderment

My mom gave a great suggestion the other day to help me get in the groove of blogging. Since interesting stories or events don't exactly happen EVERY day of my life, I can use this forum to share with you guys funny stories of things that have happened in the past as well. This weekend, David and I went out of town, and flying reminded me of a funny story that happened last year.

So, David has been really into Texas Hold 'Em poker for the last 3 years or so. When we were in the States a couple of years ago, he purchased a pretty nice poker chip set at Wal Mart. It has nice, heavy clay chips and they are stored in a silver case with handles that looks a lot like a gun case for a small handgun or something. Anyway, traveling with it in Asia has proved to be interesting on a couple of occasions.

Last year we had the following incident when David carried the poker set onto a plane, so we had to bring it through security. Of course as soon as it came through the scanner, they confisgated the bag it was in and took it out to examine it. I saw the image on the screen--basically 6 dark, solid cylinders (the rows of chips) encased in a metal case. I would agree it looked suspicious! So, the security guards took it out, opened it up, and immediately all looked very perplexed.

I, trying to be helpful, said, "It is a game. Maybe you have seen this in the movies? It is called poker."

The security guards were 3 males and 1 female. The female answered, "Oh yeah! She's right! I have seen this on the movies. It is a card game!" She was ignored.

So, the head security guard goes and gets his boss to come and look. More head scratching, grunts, and general confusion. This guy goes and gets another guy, same thing. Lots of taking out individual chips, examining them with head cocked, like they were looking at alien technology or something. This guy goes and gets someone even higher up, same thing. All the while, the lowly female security guard is saying that she knows what it is.

Finally, the highest level guy (whoever he was) decides that whatever it is (he is still not listening to the female guard) it is probably safe and allows us to go on through. Thankfully for David, we were able to keep the poker set which he is very attatched to. We were very afraid it might face the same fate as some very suspicious refrigerator magnets I tried to bring through security here once that were immediately confisgated. :)

Hey, at least we know they take our safety seriously.