The Aerie

I am the Smartest Moron in the World

Or NEVER LEAVE YOUR PASSPORT AT HOME

Somewhere out there on the Internet there is a web-spider. A web-spider is a program that automatically searches the Internet and collects the information that it finds. Somewhere on the Internet there is a web-spider that searches for naïve, gawping stupidity.

That web spider will find my post from yesterday, and it will feed. It will grow fat and torpid over the volume and quality of naïveté, and slither satisfied into its dark lair to digest its rich, satisfying meal.

Somewhere on the Internet there is a reader who might read yesterday's post, the part where I drove into the Czech Republic without my daughter's passport, and the soldier at the border said "Oh, you might have some trouble getting back into Germany. You might have to pay a fine."

And that reader, if they have any empathy at all, at that point will say to themselves "Oh dear."

The day started off well enough. We woke early, walked our luggage over to the Tesco - a big shopping mall in the middle of Prague - and stored it in our car which had spent the night safely and freely in the Tesco garage. Then we went upstairs to the mall to have breakfast in a cafe. After indulging in half an hour of shopping, we hopped in the car and attempted to escape Prague.

The first problem was that the navigator computer in our host's car refused to aknowledge the existence of Leipzig, our destination city. In fact it refused to acknowledge any city along our planned route of escape from the Czech Republic.

This presented a problem, because our map of Prague only went out so far, and it didn't reach to the beltway around the city. We couldn't tell which major road leading out of Prague would get us out of the city, and which would double back on itself and dump us downtown again. We pulled over and spent 15 minutes planning a route out of town, and then spent the next hour completely unable to escape.

Along the way an interesting and very kind thing happened. An old man waved at our car as we drove past, and made the open-close-open hand gesture to turn on our headlights. I had no idea that it was a requirement for driving, but of course as soon as he did that and I turned on my lights I noticed everyone else had them on too. Some old duffer was observant enough to notice some car in the traffic, quick enough to react, and cared enough to bother. I really appreciated that old fellow.

Finally I pulled into a filling station, where I filled the tank, quizzed the kind old lady behind the counter for an escape route, and bought a different map of Prague to help us get away. Thus armed, we managed to finally reach the beltway and escape the city - hooray!

We then spent another few hours crossing the northern Czech Republic. What absolutely gorgeous land. Rolling hills, broad valleys, low mountains stretching off into the distance. Fabulous. And the weather was great.

As we approached the border with Germany, an odd change came over the towns through which we passed. The Czech towns had always been poor by comparison, but they had been well-kept, lived in. Now they started to look unkempt, shabby. I noticed a couple of "Gentleman's clubs" on the roadside. Then a few more. Finally I pointed out to my wife that there were a LOT of them, and over there, a "sauna."

"I guess we know where the Germans go to party," I told her.

Then we passed a woman standing on the roadside in too-small clothing. There, another, in tight shorts up ahead.

"Lovely countryside," I muttered under my breath, "rolling hills, green pastures, hookers."

Then it got silly. The frequency of scantily-clad women on the roadside climbed past Las Vegas levels until the needle wavered just below "downtown Thailand." And then, just as suddenly as it began, it dropped off to nothing after we passed a small roadside cabin with plate-glass windows on two corners and two gals in their underwear lounging in the sunlight.

For a while things seemed normal again as we climbed up the hill. Then, at about 1:00 in the afternoon, we crested another saddle in the mountains and saw in the distance the border checkpoint at Altendorf. Apparently when German men cross the border for illicit activites, they like to have at least one range of mountains in between themselves and their wives. Given what I've seen of elderly German women, this is probably a wise precaution.

Now, the day before when we had checked into the Prague hotel, I had I thought been clever. Before leaving on our trip, I scanned all of our passports and stored the images in a secure, secret place on the Internet. When we checked in, the clerk asked for our passports and I explained that we did not have our daughter's. Then I gave her the link to the passport on the Internet, and when she brought up the image I had her print off two copies - one for the hotel, and one for me.

Thus armed with four passports and a color printout of a passport, we approached the Altendorf checkpoint. I remembered the words of the Czech border guard, and hoped the fine wouldn't be too expensive. [Insert sound of web-spider sucking hard on the naïeveté here.]

"Vas ist?" said the soldier, as I handed him the paper.

"My daughter left her passport in Neumarkt." I tried to explain.

I was not encouraged when another soldier approached, asked in German what was happening, and then broke into loud laughter when the solder said "His daughter's passport is in Neumarkt." It wasn't nasty laughter, or grim laughter - it was exactly the kind of surprised laughter you make when the thought running through your head is "And he thinks this piece of paper is going to help?" The soldiers instructed us to park to one side, and we waited, but I remained confident things would be okay. The Czech soldier had said we might have to pay a fine, that's all. [Suuuuucck-uuck-uucck-uck-uck]

After a nervous 20 minute wait in the car, a grim faced soldier approached. Speaking in rapid German he pointed in an odd direction, over his shoulder to the other side of the guard-house.

"Sprechen sie English, bitte?" I asked as politely as I could.

He shook his head. "Nein."

"Was ist dis?" I asked, pointing in the direction he was indicating.

"Beck," he ordered. "American Embassy. Prague."

My heart sank through my stomach into my feet. "Prague?" I asked weakly.

"Not official document," he said (his no-English was better than my no-German), "Go back. American Embassy."

With that he ordered us to U-turn, opened a gap in the outbound line of horny German men, and saw us back into the Czech Republic. Then he handed us our passports and one humble printout and waved us away.

With pure despair chilling my heart I drove back to the nearest service station and parked, absently waved off a cloud of hookers, and stared back up the road towards Prague.

For months the kids have been dying, absolutely dying to get to the Games Convention 2006 in Leipzig. My older son, who more than deserves to go and has been my staunch right hand through much of this trip, has been walking up to me at odd times, bouncing up on the balls of his feet, and chanting "LeipzigLeipzigLeipzig!" Last night in Prague my younger boy kept saying "Can we go back to the hotel and go to sleep now so we can go to Leipzig in the morning?"

Going to Prague and back to this checkpoint would by itself consume the remainder of the day - and I've heard nightmare stories about dealing with Embassies. It was already Friday, and if there were any bureaucratic delays - or if the Czech bureaucrats adhered to the dreadful work habits that I've read about - then we would be in Prague for the entire weekend, and possibly longer. Leipzig would be gone, and my children would be terribly disappointed. The whole Trip to Germany 2006 was two wheels over the canyon, and rocking forward on the frame. Consumed by gloom, I could not think of other solutions. Even my cell phone couldn't reach the Internet to look up the number of the American Embassy in Prague in order to talk to them, and my cell phone has otherwise had flawless Internet connectivity.

Fortunately my wife had her Lonely Planet Germany guide, which included the phone number of the American Embassy in Germany. While my cell phone had no Internet, the T-Mobile voice service still worked. I spoke to the Embassy receptionist for several minutes, but she did not sound encouraging. She didn't seem to consider that there was anything the American Embassy in Germany could do about Americans attempting to enter Germany from the Czech Republic, and seemed to think it only natural that we would have to talk to the American Embassy in Prague (which number she provided).

Then I remembered the image of my daughter's passport that was on the Internet, and suggested she look up the link. She became very confused at this point, and said, "Please hold."

And then my saint picked up the phone. Alison, from the American Emergency Services group recieved my call. Apparently when the Americans sound desperate enough, they are passed to this squad of crack specialists. I explained my situation to her, and after some difficulties (I couldn't properly remember the link location and everything would have fallen apart if the hotel printout didn't happen to have the link info on the bottom) she managed to pull up the image on her browser.

"Well," she mused, "It looks like a valid passport, but I can't tell if that's genuinely your daughter."

"No, but the guards can," I said, "She's right here with me."

"Well, go back and see if you can get a phone number from them where I can call, I'll talk to my colleagues here and see what they think, this is an odd situation, we've never had this before."

I drove back to the checkpoint, where we enountered a lot of difficulty making the guards understand that we wanted the American Embassy in Berlin to call them, and could we get a phone number. Then we finally got a phone number and it didn't work.

This is due to an odd thing I haven't mentioned before, but which has been notable on this journey: Europeans are mutating their numeral 1's into some strange new symbol that looks like an upside-down "V". Basically the "barb" at the top of the 1 has extended down almost to the bottom of the vertical bar. Well, when the solder wrote down the phone number of the base, he wrote 034-123/456-7890. Unfortunately, I read his / as an extra 1, and the esrtwhile Alison could not complete the call.

Meanwhile, we could not advance any further into the checkpoint than the guard shack, because every pace past that put us in Germany, and we didn't have permission to cross to Germany. Finally the guards gave us permission to walk into the administrative office some ten paces on German soil, in order to resolve our problem.

A pair of German men were ahead of us at the window, and although they didn't seem to be occupying the attention of the soldiers beyond, neither would they move away from the window to let me at the speaker. A couple of polite "Enschuldigung" were completely ignored. And the last thing I wanted to do right then was annoy the guards in the Administrative office by being pounded into a bloody pile in their atrium at the hands of the two broad-shouldered German workers.

Unfortunately, the patient Alison was on the phone with me the whole time, and she was ten minutes from leaving her office for the day. So I screwed my courage to the sticking-place (that, by the way, is the clumisiest idiom in the English language, unseating 'between a rock and a hard place' in recent polling of people with too much time on their hands) and shouldered my way between them.

The soldier behind the counter could not understand my question, so finally in desperation I told Alison to hold on, and slid my cell phone through the hole to the soldier. He picked it up, looked at it to figure out where to talk (my cell phone does ten million interesting things, but looks like a sliver bar of soap), and tenatively said, "Hallo?"

He talked to Allison for a while, then passed the phone back through to me. It was 14:29.

"I'm sending him a fax," she said, "I can't promise you any results," and disconnected.

My daughter and I waited in the Administrative office for ten minutes. People came and went. The German men left, happy, with a new stamped piece of paper. My phone rang.

"I've sent the fax, you should hear something in a few minutes," Alison told me, and rang off for the day. It was 14:40.

We waited. Ten minutes later a soldier came down from upstairs and pushed two pieces of paper through the window. The soldiers inside unfolded them, and I saw my daughter's passport image in blurry fax-and-white. Discussion followed. Finally a soldier with some English approached the window. He looked at the pictures, looked at my daughter, walked away. I could tell that the fax was exactly the same image as the one I had folded in my hand, the printed-out image of my daughter's scanned passport.

Five minites later he returned. "Okay," he said. "We make a new passport."

I couldn't believe my ears, "You make a new passport?"

"Ja," he said, holding up a piece of green paper, "Temporary."

My heart began to prickle with pins and needles as hope slowly seeped back into it. A tall, burly soldier brought out a carbon-copy pad, and had my daughter and I sign it in several places. He tore bits off, handed some through the window, others to the administrative officers. He had me fill out my mailing address, then had me rewrite "Minneapolis, Minnesota" in full, because "Mpls, MN" meant nothing to him.

My wife had joined us in here somewhere, and she was there when he came back to the window.

"Photograph," he said, looking between us.

"Photograph?" I asked

"Ja, für passport," he said, pointing at the blank space on the form.

The hope that had recently started trickling into my heart withdrew with a sharp sucking sound. My daughter, wife and I patted our pockets helplessly for a moment. Then my wife (notice, whenever I'm completely unprepared, who the person is who has just what is needed?) said "Wait!" She scrabbled through her little black book to a vinyl pouch at the back where she keeps... school pictures of our children. She removed our daughter's latest picture and handed it to the soldier.

"Too big," he said.

"Cut it!" the three of us responded in unison.

"I cut?" he said, miming scissors.

"Ja!"

So the big burly solder sat at a desk and began to trim the edges off the tiny photograph. Meanwhile other solders wrote and another stamped. The fellow who knew English approached.

"The cost," he began.

'Okay,' I told myself, 'here it comes. I've got about 100 Euros on me, Theresa must have some. Maybe they take Visa?'

"Twenty-five Oy-rows."

Twenty five? Twenty FIVE? That's less than the ORIGINAL passport cost!

"Ich haber funfsec Oy-rows," I replied, after doublechecking "Fifty" in German with Theresa, "Ist OK?"

"Ja," said the English-speaking soldier.

In German, but clearly understandable, the burly solder looked up from his trimming and shouted, "Maybe you buy two!"

"Ja! Ja!" I agreed, a little hysterically. I was ready to buy EIGHT, and make a donation to the Old German Soldier's fund to boot.

Stamp, glue, sign, and the soldier handed us a green slip of paper with my daughter's delicately-trimmed picture stuck to it.

"Okay, you go through now!"

"Ein millionen danke!" I effused.

Scarely daring to hope, we left the administrative office where we had been for more than an hour. My older son was waiting across the parking lot, and I gave him a tenative thumbs-up to lessen the suspense. We got in the car, and simply cut into the now-half-mile-long line of waiting cars by inserting our front bumper in between two vehicles. We rolled up to the checkpoint, and I handed out four passports... and a green piece of paper with my daughter's picture glued to it.

The soldier who took it knew exactly who I was. I'd pestered them at the gatehouse ninety minutes past, and he'd had occasion to go by us in the anteroom of the administrative office on some errands of his own. So he looked a little startled and maybe annoyed to see us in line again, handing him some flimsy document we had somehow cobbled together. However at least it wasn't the gruff guard who had turned us back to Prague. The soldier looked at our documents...

...and sent us to wait in the same spot as we had the first time.

This wait, it was from hell. It was worse than everything before it, because for the first time we had gotten a taste of hope. Meanwhile, the gatehouse had its own priorities, and dealing with the backed-up mile of cars came first. They opened another gate and started working the line down. Twenty minutes later it was three cars long and they closed off the second gate.

There had been a lone red car ahead of us in the waiting area, and by the time the line was down to nothing the waiting area was full. The red car was dealt with first, and as far as I could tell they were turned back. The tension in the car was thick enough to cut with a knife, and we were hungry enough to eat the slices. We waited. Soldiers came out of the gatehouse, went past us without stopping. Soldiers did things we couldn't quite see inside the gatehouse.

Finally a young woman soldier came out, holding our passports. She walked up to our car. My mouth was dry. My heart was a raisin in the hope-blasting glare of a noonday sun.

Hardly stopping, she handed me the passports and said "Okay, you can go!"

Celebrating quietly, lest we annoy the guards and they change their minds, we pulled out and drove from the checkpoint. I kept waiting for someone to stop us, but no one did. We were in Germany.

I knew we had gotten off SO easy. Others in our position have had to go back to Prague, sacrificing their itineraries and dreams to wade through the icy waters of Czech bureaucracy. But because I had thought to scan our passports and put them in a secure place on the web, we had overcome my stupidity in not making sure all my kids brought their passports for our trip to Prague. I am indeed the smartest moron in the world.

And luckiest. Only the able assistance of Alison at the U.S. Embassy in Germany got us through. The exact same image that in our hands was a meaningless piece of paper was our ticket into Germany when it bore the imprimatur of the Embassy fax machine. If she had been less intelligent, less considerate, or less creative and innovative, I would be posting a very different blog tonight, from Prague.

"Damn," I said to my family, finally daring to believe we'd made it. "I keep expecting someone to tap me on my shoulder and say in German 'You most com beck to ze border!'" Everyone laughed the shaky laughs of released tension, and the kids went on a spree making up more and more elaborate scenarios for being recalled to the checkpoint.

As we regained our equilibrium we began to take stock of the world around us once again. I could almost begin enjoying the beautiful rolling countryside and quaint German villages through which we passed. Unfortunately traffic was starting to pile up. We thought it was because the road was becoming steep, and at one point we saw below us a long semi-trailer slowly negotiating a switchback in the road. So relieved were we to be in Germany at all, however, that we did not chafe at the slow progress towards our goal, even when we completed the switchback and came to a complete stop. I took advantage of the apparent complete stop in traffic to review the map of Germany.

Then it happened.

My door opened of its own accord.

A hand reached in and tapped me on the shoulder.

A voice barked something sharp in German in my ear.

Time slowed. My vision telescoped. Slowly I turned.

At the end of a long dark tunnel was an old man.

He wasn't in uniform.

Time lurched.

Resumed.

"Was?" I said, not only unable to understand his words, but unable to recall hearing them.

He pointed, gestured, spoke again in German.

Finally I got it.

The old man who had opened my car door was reminding me to turn on my headlights. I threw the switch and thanked him. He gave me a tight smile, satisfied, and walked back to his car, its door standing open, behind mine in the line of stopped traffic.

We wouldn't have made it here to our five-star hotel in Leipzig tonight without all those people: the old men in the Czech Republic and in Germany who kept us from getting pulled over for yet another ticket. The burly soldier trimming the school photograph. And of course Alison, who will find out that we made it through the checkpoint when the flowers arrive on her desk.

All of them made it possible to get here. The traffic from Altendorf to Dresden was dreadful, but we would have had to drive back to Prague otherwise, so we enjoyed it. We got here too late for the convention today, but we have all day tomorrow and Sunday and that ought to be sufficient.

We wouldn't have had any of that if a lot of people weren't willing to help me compensate for my own naiëveté about the importance of passports and the ramifications of not having them.

We have a new plan, now. We're going to take our daughter to a tattoo parlor and tattoo her passport onto her back.

And on my forehead we'll tattoo "Don't leave home without it." In reverse so I can read it in the mirror...

Posted by Albatross at August 25, 2006 3:54 PM | TrackBack