I just came back to Sweden from Brazil and I smuggled a kitten over on the plane with me!My boyfriend and I were on holiday in this tiny hippie town called Jericoacoara with nothing but streets of sand and little huts. We heard something going "Meow, meow, meow" and we saw a bunch of kids playing with a tiny kitten hardly much bigger than a foetus. There was this old lady standing next to them. She told us the kids had found the kitten, but couldn't find the mother, so now they wanted to give it away. My boyfriend just stuck his hand down the box and went, "We'll take it."The kitty was so tiny it fit snugly into the breast pocket of his shirt. It was too young to eat food, and it wouldn't take a bottle so my boyfriend would put milk in his mouth and the kitten would suck it out.There was no chance we were going to put her in quarantine on our way back to Sweden because she'd be there for months, also, animals need to be a few months old to even be put in quarantine, and she'd only just popped out of the womb. So we took her to the vet on our own.She was absolutely healthy, and kittens can't get rabies until they're a few months old anyway.We put her in an old Salomon sports bag, but I think any big-ish bag would work. Like, a Hermes' Paddington would work well, but a Marc Jacobs lambskin zip clutch would be way too tiny. We put some other stuff in there too, because walking through security with and empty bag would look suspicious. We padded her with clothes and put some sand in the bottom of the bag to weigh it down and then we checked in the luggage and prepared for security.I carried our keys, little coins in every pocket and wore a metal hairclip so I would set the metal detector off. We made sure my boyfriend didn't have ANY metal on him at all. We even remembered all the things you usually forget, like belt buckles and Dr. Marten's steel toe caps. So while I was getting searched he would walk straight through. He taped his tshirt around his waist, took the kitten out of the bag in the toilets and stuck the kitten down the top and put on a Fred Perry Harrington. Mind you, this was in the middle of the summer in Brazil, so it was about 40°C.It was pretty nerve-racking and I kept thinking about Midnight Express but we got through!We found two lone seats way in the back of plane, and the kitten got to hang out in the bag again.Things got a bit sticky when the staff suddenly announced that we were making an extra stop. We got to sit in the airport for two hours, so we took out the kitten so it wouldn't die. A couple of other passengers noticed her, but being the cutest thing on earth means no one will fuck with you.But when we got to Amsterdam we had missed our connection because of the extra stop, and we had to check all our stuff out. We had to get the kitten out again, and more people noticed. When we were going to check in our luggage again the check in girl took one look at us, and instead of the usual "Did you pack your bag yourself?" she said: "Are you carrying any small cats with you?" I guess someone must have noticed us and passed our description around or something, because suddenly a lady in the staff started shouting at us and asking where we kept the kitten. My boyfriend said we didn't have any kittens, but she wouldn't budge so finally we told her it was in the bag. "That's no way to carry a kitten," she screamed and then she said if we didn't have any papers for it, we wouldn't be let on the plane.We just said "fuck it", and went to refund our tickets. We figured we'd probably burned all our chances with the airlines on that airport, and probably all others in all of Amsterdam, and we couldn't be sure of the trains.We decided to rent a car, but for that to happen we needed to find a car with a Swedish registration plate. Someone would have needed to rent a car in Sweden and then left it in Amsterdam. That happens like once a year, tops, but amazingly, in the fifth place we asked we found one! We got the car at one in the day, drove until one at night, slept until 6AM in the morning and were in Stockholm by 10AM.There weren't even any road tolls. The kitty-cat's name is Jeri by the way.ANNIKA ZAKRISSON
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