[noduerme]

If you're an American and you rent an apartment, the local police keep your passport until you leave. You keep a xerox. That's how it was at the time. I don't know if that's still the case.

I didn't feel good about it when I found out (actually, the moment I signed the lease), but there was nothing I could do about it.

My exit from Vietnam was almost humorous. I had about 50 DVDs in my suitcase, mostly encrypted backups and burned movies, and every single one was inspected by sight, holding it up to the light (to see how far the burn went?), then left on the floor of the airport for me to pick up. Upon re-entering the US, the customs officers did almost the same thing, and then just confiscated all my discs.

Weirdly, no one on either side checked my laptop.

[evilos]

They took your DVDs? On what pretext? Did you get them back?

[noduerme]

The pretext was piracy, since some of them were labeled with the names of movies. I protested they should just keep those ones, but they took them all and said I was lucky they weren't going to prosecute me. I didn't even try to get them back.

[pdntspa]

So how do you travel outside the country then, if the police are holding your passport?

[noduerme]

You need to request it from the police for travel. In my experience, I did it via my landlord, and it took about a day.