le nouveau système de la surveillance

[dotter2007]

I wonder how many of you are aware of the new secret surveillance agents program that has recently emerged in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Asia. The striking thing about it is that the surveillance agents use funny gadgets. The most typical are ear phones and ipods or CD players or things of that sort. The surveillance agents walk around with these pretending to be listening to music. But they also use cell phones, lap tops, or have casts on their arms and legs pretending to have injured limbs, or they walk with canes or roll around in wheel chairs. There are bugs and cameras hidden in these, and the ipods are especially used as a communication devices. (Don't believe the news about Apple's spectacular success in the market with its ipods; it's only a cover for the tons of surveillance agents wearing them on streets and in metros.) As for the surveillance agents, they range from teenagers through young adults to senior citizens, but the most notable are disgruntled males, since it is especially the economically dispossessed who would take up this job. The surveillance agents ride in metros and buses, sit in coffee houses, or just walk around the streets. These amateur "agents" don't particularly follow the targets of their surveillance, but are simply installed in every corner of the environment in which their target moves about. Although the program is supposed to be classified or things like that, it is actually widely known.

I'm telling you this because I've been under surveillance for two and a half years. At first it was RCMP, CSIS, and FBI, which did not create much of a problem for me. But since last August I have come under surveillance by the Department of Homeland Security -- no, you don't have to be someone important to come under their surveillance; I watched too much conspiracy videos, although I don't do that anymore -- and it is especially the Department of Homeland Security which use this new surveillance technique. The other agencies use "traditional" technique. But by now DHS has operations around the world.

I typically ran into 20 to 50 or so of these surveillance agents per day, whether it is in Los Angeles, Montreal, Asia or Europe. And I'm pretty annoyed by them -- by my life-long surveillance by DHS -- so I'm announcing this to the world in hope of exacerbating my situation.

By the way, if someone posts replies denying everything I just said, it's just DHS internet agents trying to protect their "secrets". I have had plenty of struggling with them on the internet too.

[cuty-pie]

Why were you under surveillance???

[midalli]

.......................chacun son trip.

[dotter2007]

The Department of Homeland Security learned a lot of techniques from another elite agency in the U.S. late last year. One is to use fake institutions as front. For example, there is a certain Art Institute in Santa Ana, California, that is not listed in telephone books or anything. From outside it looks like a school but deep inside is actually their operation center. I just thought that is interesting.

[cuty-pie]

Envoyé par dotter2007 The Department of Homeland Security learned a lot of techniques from another elite agency in the U.S. late last year. One is to use fake institutions as front. For example, there is a certain Art Institute in Santa Ana, California, that is not listed in telephone books or anything. From outside it looks like a school but deep inside is actually their operation center. I just thought that is interesting.

How funny...i know that institute vey well

I had friends that attended that school

[dotter2007]

Je voudrais vous raconter l'histoire la plus bizarre dans le guerre contre le terrorisme. C'est une vrai histoire. Mais je ne peux pas raconter en français une histoire aussi complexe que celle-ci, donc je la raconte en anglais.

Late last year I was the biggest target of the Department of Homeland Security. This happened in Long Beach, California. In August last year I came under DHS surveillance. I knew it since the beginning because they used the same old technique that I had already become familiar with: surveillance agents wearing ear phones with ipods or CD players or using lap tops with bugs in them, etc. By that time I had already been under surveillance by other agencies for over a year and a half and had become quite good at detecting surveillance. In particular I knew about the ipods.

The ipods have their secret history of being doubled as surveillance devices. The first time I saw ipod being so used was May 2006, some months before the story of the Department of Homeland Security began. I was on a flight from Los Angeles to Montreal. At the time I was under FBI surveillance. The FBI decided to take extra caution of me for this flight, and they sent a super-athletic woman -- whose hand was bigger than my head -- to sit on my right and two marines to sit on my left. The woman was wearing earphones with ipods. As the plane was about to take off, she started manipulating her ipod and these words popped up on the screen: "The plane is taking off the ground." I watched the whole thing from behind her shoulder without her noticing.

I'm not here to tell the story of my encounter with the FBI -- how the FBI decided to investigate me -- but only the story of the Department of Homeland Security. I shall only note that the FBI investigation was just a passing phenomenon. The FBI came and went. But they must have left me on some sort of watch list, for when my second flight to Montreal in August 11 last year coincided with timing of the London terror plot, that day I was pulled aside and then put back into line several times at the airport as I was getting ready to board my plane. The Department of Homeland Security must have found the coincidence suspicious and thusly they came into my life.

After I came back from Montreal to Southern California, at first I ran into between 10 to 20 surveillance agents per day: at coffeehouses, at the university campus (Cal State Long Beach), on buses, etc. I bore it but then events started building up momentum. In late September one day when I went to meet with my doctor (who knew I was under surveillance) in Westwood Los Angeles she warned me to stay out of the north side because the President himself was in town for fund-raising activities. I returned to my home in the south but I was escorted by several surveillance agents on the metro rail. The authorities must have thought that problematic individuals like me must be under watch when the President was in town to keep him (the President) safe. The surveillance was not so different than usual but that night I blew up because more than a year and nine months of being considered a threat had finally got to me. I talked angrily on the phone about this with my best friend in Albany, New York, saying that I had enough of all these investigations by one agency after another. The next day I was still angry and talked to someone else about my being annoyed by the constant surveillance. The Department of Homeland Security became alarmed -- they probably thought I was about to snap and do something! -- and increased their surveillance of me, which made me even more angry. The day after I decided to take a trip to ACLU but I rode the bus from downtown L.A. to Beverly Hills and back to downtown again without being able to find it. As I stood at the downtown bus stop frustrated as ever, a man who looked obviously like he came from the military came wearing an ipod to conduct surveillance on me. I felt the situation oppressive and left but then came back to him and started begging him for help, tears running down my cheeks. I asked him to take me to ACLU and when he refused I just clung to his presence and followed him. "You cannot follow me" he said but I in my frustration followed him onto the bus anyway with tears pouring down my face. The surveillance agent man was quite surprised by the development -- I just wouldn't let him go nor stop crying -- while I just thought, since he was there to find out where I wanted to go, and since I couldn't find where I wanted to go, we might as well help each other by having him -- the surveillance agent -- take me to where I wanted to go. But he was not amused by the tactic and he slipped off the bus in Beverly Hills and although I followed him out the bus I lost him. Some passersby did direct me to ACLU, which apparently I passed over near downtown without noticing. I went. On the bus to ACLU the DHS used relays: one surveillance agent would exit the bus while another one would come up. When I came out of ACLU, another surveillance agent, wearing earphones as usual, came next to me at the bus stop. I decided to follow him again as we both exited the bus at downtown. This seems to have alarmed the DHS even more and they sent out a helicopter to track me. I got on another bus with more surveillance agents on board to go to my next destination, my grandfather's place in Alhambra, to discuss the possibility of returning to Taiwan, my home country. When I came back to the downtown transit station late at night a DHS agent came up to me looking bemused and tried to talk with me. Apparently the way I dealt with their surveillance that day -- especially the first agent -- had amused some in the DHS as well.

[dotter2007]

By this time the Department of Homeland Security had realized that this target of theirs was wildly resistant to surveillance and started mobilizing more surveillance agents. When I went to the Cal State Long Beach campus, the place would be filled with surveillance agents; and when I went to the alumni office to get my alumni card (I was a graduate of CSULB), the office lady there was scared out of her body to see me. The same with bus drivers. I was pissed off to the extreme by the fact that the DHS had informed the entire town that a major threat was here when I was no such thing at all. My resistance consisted in publicly counting out the surveillance agents; and when the Department of Homeland Security became ever more alarmed and continued to increase the number of surveillance agents around me, it also made it even easier to identify them, since my environment had literally changed. And then for inexplicable reasons -- I think it was because I one day threw out from my wallet a piece of paper with the extension of a phone number on it -- the DHS suddenly went into a state of emergency and the next day they locked down the part of Los Angeles that I traversed through as I rode the bus to meet my doctor. That day I counted 70 or so surveillance agents. As I returned home that night another DHS agent on the rail with me was amused by me as ever and wanted to converse with me. I had again amused the DHS because that day I kept saying hi to their surveillance agents with a dorky smile and telling jokes while many surveillance agents were around recording me, both of which caused not a few of them to burst into laughter. But the DHS only intensified their effort afterwards. My doctor had been for a while required to wear wires to spy on me, and my website went down. (It was hosted on a server in Britain. What is usually done is that the agents here call up the security service in Britain to move the server in question to another server for a day, and then move the content back to the original server; the second server is then carried off for analysis. You would then notice that your website is down during the time of the transfer of the server and that when it comes back on the content you have added to your website during that day of transfer disappeared: it has been carried off.) Gradually coming to understand that I had no terrorist connection, the Department of Homeland Security had also started their sting operation on me on the internet. They started inserting into my search results links they were trying to lure me to visit. For example, when I did a search on some topics of philosophy on Google or Ask.com, interspersed among the links that the search engine produced would be links to terrorist websites that the DHS had artificially inserted. I never took the bait and just skipped these. Once when I did a search on a topic of feminism, the DHS, trying even harder, inserted among the results this link: "Aristotelian Nietzsche Al Quaeda appreciation of North America...", thinking that since I liked philosophy I might take this bait and look at the website. I did get surprised by DHS's control of the search engines. On the outside the Department of Homeland Security continued to increase the number of surveillance agents around me, and I continued to count them out publicly ever more easily. This was partly because their surveillance agents looked more grotesque than ordinary people. By the later half of October, my count of DHS surveillance agents had reached 500.

At this time a vast number of black Cadillac limousines with tainted windows started showing up in my neighborhood, which, as a ghetto, had never seen even one before. Evidently many important people were surprised by my “special ability” to detect surveillance and came to see me in person. In fact the secretary of DHS himself had stepped in, as I later would learn. Just now the Department of Homeland Security geared up for a full-scale surveillance war. When I got on the bus there would be no real passengers at all on it but only their surveillance agents pretending to be passengers. They apparently had evacuated the bus on previous stops and re-filled it with surveillance agents only. The whole city of Long Beach went into a covert state of emergency, as librarians and bus drivers were all told to watch out for me. This was October. My neighborhood had become a circus: everyday when I went out the street would be peopled with strange looking surveillance agents pretending to be homeless or disabled moving about slowly or pretending to be holding up signs (house for sale and so on) or reading newspaper in the car. The neighborhood looked completely abnormal. I talked openly on the phone about this to show them that I still knew what was going on. As the matter progressed finally DHS decided to seal me up permanently in a “surveillance bubble”: everywhere I went the place would be evacuated and re-filled with surveillance agents pretending to be doing whatever. When I went to the university library (at both Cal State Long Beach and UCLA), the place would have been evacuated and re-filled with their bum-looking secret agents pretending to be students studying (most of these were hired temporarily for the occasion, mostly 18 to 19 year-olds, and none of them looked like students at all); the coffeehouse I frequented was permanently evacuated and re-filled with surveillance agents pretending to be employees and customers; in fact the entire neighborhood I was living in seemed evacuated – I don’t know what, but the streets were filled only with surveillance agents pretending to be pedestrians; all nearby stores were evacuated and re-filled with surveillance agents. Where did the original inhabitants go? Perhaps the extraordinary measures that the U.S. government had been preparing for sometime were ridiculously activated for this idiotic occasion and the “real people” had been sent to those FEMA concentration camps. I don’t know. If I went outside the city – such as to West Hollywood once – I’d find that the employee at Subway was already notified about me and about my dietary habits (he with his evil smile spelled out my order before I needed to tell him). This happened numerous times. The bus and metro lines that I rode regularly were permanently evacuated; when I rode them there would never be any real passengers but only surveillance agents on them – there must have been a team going ahead of my bus evacuating all those waiting for the bus at the bus stops and replacing them with surveillance agents – and the bus drivers had always to inform the DHS about where I got off, etc. Often they filled up the metro trains with so many fake passengers that there was hardly any room to breathe, even during the mid-day when normally there would be few people riding it. The DHS would continue to have the problem of “over-doing”.

Homeland Security agents started moving into my apartment building, and they regularly had my manager open my door – no, they don’t pick locks – so as to search my home while I was away. I knew this because, other than moving things around without putting them back in order, they regularly stole things from my place: my old cellphone, my phone jacks, my sweater, anything. My apartment was filled with bugs – you knew this when you talked to yourself in the apartment about surveillance techniques and the next day the surveillance would change in reaction to your feedback. The anti-virus software in my computer was disabled, and virus was inserted into my website.

Not only did they have agents sign up for the internet forums I frequented, but once they evacuated physicsforums.com where I was posting my questions and replaced all users with their agents to bombard me with negative comments about my post.

[dotter2007]

Why did the Department of Homeland Security do this when it had already become clear to them that I had no terrorist connection? I had sealed my fate one Thursday night in early November. I had ridden the bus and metro for four days between Los Angeles and Long Beach with nobody else on them save DHS agents, and I just blew up. That night, knowing that every word I uttered in my apartment was recorded, I addressed angrily the secretary of DHS himself: "Yes I know I know every single person on the bus and metro is fake! Because you don't know how to do it, you dumb mother f**ker!" Referring to Monday night when I entered the UCLA research library to find that all students there had been evacuated and replaced with DHS agents pretending to be students, I pointed out to him that he failed to fool me that night, that his fakery was obvious, because he simply didn’t have the right people. Their red-neck agents that came in to replace the students just didn't look like students. DHS would continue to have the same problem in the future when they'd attempt to create fake libraries to fool me. For example, if you look at the inside of a university library in California, you would see around 30 percent white female, 25 percent white male, 40 percent Asian and a 5 percent others. When DHS evacuated university libraries, they would refill the place with half Asian and half Hispanic and blacks, with very few whites that were furthermore all bum-looking. The people in DHS weren’t sensitive to details in the environment. Just when I finished my criticism, my roommate, blind because of kidney failure and hallucinating everyday because of the medication he had to take daily for his transplanted kidney, stumbled out of his room after hearing me calling out the name of the secretary of DHS and started talking to me: "You must trust in God... that Michael whatever his name is, he's a movie director right? He's movie director." He's hallucinating again and didn't know what he was talking about, but fate had it that he should have hit right on the target, for replacing passengers on the bus and students in the libraries with secret agents, isn't that just like directing a movie? So I shouted in concurrence, "Yeah he's a movie director!" The recording of this conversation would find its way to the ear of the secretary of DHS himself and would greatly enrage him, as later someone else (not from the DHS but who was an insider) would later confirm to me.

Anyone who knows something about the secretary of DHS knows that he has a bad temper and can be very vengeful at times. Now that I had made him look like a fool in front of all the important people and exposed the poor performance of his agency by easily pointing out their “secret agents” in public he would try his best to conduct on me the most pointless exercises in clandestine operation in order to demonstrate his ability to fool me and reclaim his dignity. But the harder his agency tried, the more obvious the deception. For they bombarded me every single day with fake places and fake circumstances, fake customers and fake employees at fake stores, and fake websites on the internet, and had not learned that only a lie embedded in the context of truth could work to deceive.

This technique -- taking over a store or institution at any time when knowing that you are about to go there, evacuating everyone therein and then filling up the place with secret agents pretending to be the employees and customers in order to trap you -- is part of the art of clandestine operation and the Department of Homeland Security was now learning it from somewhere else and was using me as guinea pig. For example, when once in early November I was walking to the Borders Bookstore in downtown Long Beach and telling my best friend about where I was going on the cellphone, the DHS, monitoring my phone conversation, went ahead of me and immediately evacuated everyone in the bookstore and sent in their agents to pretend to be the customers and employees. When I arrived the "fake" employees interacted with me, answering my questions about the books I was seeking just as in normal days. It was of course not hard to detect that all was fake because, once again, the racial composition of the customers and employees had all changed and the place had this eerie atmosphere of emptiness. What's the point of the operation? The head of DHS simply wanted to show that he could do it. At another time they had someone I knew lure me to a small “fake” concert in Universal City where the dozen or so audience and employees were their secret agents doing the pretending (the singers were pretenders from another agency working with them). They also enlisted the help of ordinary people in the campaign to deceive me. Once I took a detour bus and went to a French restaurant in Manhattan Beach (not my usual stop) to celebrate my birthday with myself, but the DHS had evidently called up the owner and managed to have her greet in front of me their surveillance agents just coming in in order to fool me that they were real customers. When I went to the Taiwanese government office they would try the same: getting the officers there to pretend to handle documents of the surveillance agents coming in in order to make me think they were really there for visa purposes. At my church they had implanted several of their agents and they obligated some of the church officials to try to hook me up with one undercover agent, getting these good Christians to lie to me that the agent in question was a long time church member (I was a new member there).

[dotter2007]

The immediate problem the DHS had was still not having the right people to play fakery. They simply couldn't recruit the right people from outside the class of the economically dispossessed. Once when I went to visit my grandfather in Alhambra (a district of mostly Chinese and Taiwanese immigrants) the entire neighborhood was evacuated and refilled with Korean, black, and Hispanic agent-extras pretending to be shopping and strolling and banking.

Later they grasped the problem. In December first for example I went to the LA Phil Harmonic to take a break as I did the previous two times -- this place wasn’t evacuated before -- but this time the DHS did decide to evacuate the place and fill it up with fake audience. They evidently had noted that the audience there were usually classy or upper class whites, so they got agents to come in from other agencies which had whites to do the pretending. They tried so hard that night that they even evacuated the two restaurants nearby and replaced the original eaters there with extras temporarily hired to play fakes. It created a funny scene for all the "customers" in the restaurant suddenly looked much fatter than usual.

The DHS campaign against me continued throughout the month of November and I was surrounded by about 1,000 surveillance agents and extras per day with few repeats. For DHS I must have become a super monster genius who was too dangerous to be allowed to interact with ordinary people, all because of my insult of their head and because of my “special ability” to be able to identify their “secret agents” by the mere sight of them. In reality I doubted anyone would have difficulty identifying them when the entire population in the environment was literally switched over. Most of these surveillance agents were clearly hired on the spot just for this because they were either disgruntled males who couldn’t get a job elsewhere or poor immigrants or ex-gang bangers and old folks “recruited” out of jail houses and nursing homes. What was surprising to me was that among the surveillance agents were even Japanese foreign students.

As if the thousands of surveillance agents weren't enough of an exaggeration, once when I returned home late at night and the street was short on surveillance agents (perhaps they were changing shift) the Department of Homeland Security got a police helicopter to fly above me (again!) to conduct surveillance on me until I entered my apartment.

Even when I went to a strip club once (the famous Jet Strip) the customers there were evacuated and replaced with a couple of red-neck DHS agents pretending to be customers. But thank God the strippers didn’t seem replaced, for they were pretty as usual.

What made me really uncomfortable however was that the Department of Homeland Security took great interest in my dietary habits. Their surveillance agents at the coffeehouse constantly asked me what brand of juice I was drinking or what brand of cigarettes I smoked, etc. I suspected that the restaurants I dined at all had to report to DHS what food I just ordered. Why would they want all this information in their dossier on me unless they were planning to poison me?

But the event which had exacerbated me the most in this long month of November is my discovery in the last day of the month that the entire web domain on which my website was hosted was moved from its original server in Britain to one server in California that was registered under an Asian guy's name. A search on the internet for the name revealed that the man was a notorious spammer. Apparently the man was recently convicted and came into the employment of the Department of Homeland Security -- too typical of this monstrous agency to employ all the ex-cons available -- and now he had control of my precious website on which I had saved years of academic hard work. The thought that the Department of Homeland Security needed to own my entire life produced an unbearable sense of oppression. The "bubble" was complete. I now lived entirely inside the artificial world of DHS.

[dotter2007]

Hence by December the constant bombardment of fakery and surveillance bubble had passed all limits of toleration and at the same time I had become so concerned with possible poisoning that I decided to “run away”. I first planed to go to Albany NY to see my friend and then to go up to Montreal. I ditched the plan at the airport – which was evacuated – and took a shuttle down to my parents’ place to pick up my old Taiwanese passport. Both the shuttle driver and the other passenger of course were in fact working for DHS and the other passenger got off at a certain Art Institute in Santa Ana where I got off too. I tried to call up a taxi from there but the taxi company could not find any listing for the place. I looked around and saw a large number of surveillance agents (their agents, as usual, from mostly poor minorities, didn’t look like students at all). That’s when I realized that this was another one of the tactics they were learning from somewhere else: to use fake institutions as front. Deep inside this Art Institute was actually their operation center. As I left I could see a swarm of surveillance agents wearing their typical ipods and sun glasses coming out to watch me leave. When I got to my parents’ place I discovered that my ancient Taiwanese passport was vandalized: picture was torn off and birthday changed. Apparently DHS agents had searched my parents’ home already and vandalized it. Next day I bought a ticket from L. A. to Montreal just one day before the flight. When I got to the airport (LAX) – that was December 8 or so – the place seemed again evacuated, empty with only a few people who looked like surveillance agents. On the plane I wondered if the passengers around me were real or fake. When I got to Montreal, lo and behold, the entire downtown seemed blocked off and evacuated. St. Catherine, normally filled with people even late into the night, had but few pedestrians. I was pretty sure that for three days the coffeehouse at St. Laurent (next to the Second Cup) was evacuated and re-filled with their locally recruited surveillance agents, with ear phones and surveillance lap tops, pretending to be studying and waiting for me to come in. The Grande Bibliotheque at Berri-UQAM was evacuated the first night and refilled with fake patrons. The metro system seemed entirely evacuated and filled with fake passengers going back and forth waiting for me to get on. The policemen in the metro station were making jokes on me, having obviously been informed about me and ticked off by the comical situation. I asked two officers to escort me on the metro, and when we got off one of them tried to set me up with a prostitute-looking girl, having obviously been informed by DHS about my liking of a sex-worker in Montreal. Next day I went outside of downtown to Verdun but surveillance agents soon appeared there; if I went into a shop to buy cigarettes a surveillance agent would soon follow in to take note of what I was buying. Their close attention to my dietary habits freaked me out. I went into a catholic sermon and the priest almost peed his pants when he saw me. Many of the population were obviously told to watch out for me. When I got back to UQAM -- a school I once attended briefly -- the underground campus was filled with surveillance agents wearing ipods, which before this had never been seen in this school. The library of UQAM was evacuated with few people in it and the librarians kept coming to me to offer their help, obviously told by DHS to find out what I was up to. I was so terrified that the secretary of DHS had such power that he could evacuate Canada for this chicken shit matter (me the “monster genius”), that I decided to “escape” to Ottawa, thinking that he couldn’t possibly evacuate the Canadian capital for one single person who was not connected with anything but had merely insulted him and exposed the stupidity of his agency. The bus station at Berri-UQAM seemed evacuated, and on my bus I seemed to be the only real passenger while everyone else seemed to be extras pretending to be bus-riders. I got to Ottawa, and as soon as I got onto the bus there, I could see that it was filled with surveillance agents wearing their ear phones. The bus driver was obviously informed about me, constantly asking me where I was trying to go. I got off at the downtown area and saw that, although the street was filled with surveillance agents, the city did not seem evacuated. But I was frightened by the fact that every taxi-driver and bus-driver was told to watch for me and inform me on where I was going. There I bought a ticket to Taiwan, my home country, and returned to Montreal to meet up with some old friends and to take the flight. On the way back so many agent-extras filled up my bus that the bus company had to send in another one to pick up the rest of us. My old friends, obviously cooperating with DHS, nevertheless tried to comfort me and coax me to ignore what was happening, for the secretary of DHS was simply upset about his inability to fool me and the more I noticed, the more they would continue. When I got to the airport of Montreal, it was almost empty. I guessed it was evacuated as usual.

What is noteworthy about the DHS operation at Montreal is that they seem to have had better luck in recruiting. Most of the surveillance agent-extras were local ordinary Quebeckers, not the downtrodden and poor immigrants and ex-criminals and retired old people as it is in Los Angeles. At Toronto where I transferred my flight to Taiwan, however, the surveillance agents reverted back to being poor “colored” people, indicating that this city was like Los Angeles in having a much greater divide in wealth.

In Taiwan I had a break. The airport was evacuated when I got off the plane, but Taipei was not evacuated, it couldn’t be given the enormous density of the population and traffic. But the whole city was of course filled with surveillance agents, in the metro especially. Not a few of them were not of Asian stock: whites and blacks. All the civil servants were already notified about me. Again, I was constantly asked where I wanted to go by every employee I ran into. I was also followed in the old fashion way by the Taiwanese agents. I was bent on recovering my citizenship papers, so I went to the government office as soon as I could. Surveillance agents were there waiting for me with their lap tops, and the civil servants were evidently instructed to obstruct my process, so I was sent away with nothing and extremely depressed about the fact that the Department of Homeland Security had mobilized half of the planet against me to leave me no room on earth. The next day as I tried again, however, my process was facilitated. I obtained my papers and now had to go back to California to continue applying for my passport. The Taiwanese government was evidently under political pressure to see me leave: that’s the impression I got from all the civil servants I met and all the taxi-drivers who surrounded me during my last day to try to direct me to the airport without my asking.