David Goes a-Viking

After spending eight and a half months in the wilderness of Austria, it was high time for me to begin the strenuous odyssey back into civilization. I planned a trip that would take me from Klagenfurt to Vienna, whereupon I would fly into Oslo, go by train into Stockholm, and then go to Copenhagen. Thence, I planned to go experience the wonders of Scotland for nine nights, and then I would have four nights in Reykjavik, Iceland, before catching a flight I found for all of $212 to JFK and be back in America's loving embrace. 

Right there, baby.

Before my three-and-a-half week globetrotting expedition could begin, however, I needed to pack up everything I had lived with for the past 8 and a half months and de-register from Klagenfurt. I divided up my various belongings between things I could afford to mail home, things I needed to take into the carry-on bag that I would essentially be living out of on my trip, and the rest, which would go into my giant checked suitcase. I had to send my school bag in the box home because the budget airlines I would be flying with only allow one carry-on item. Because I would need the passport I kept in my school bag's front pocket all year to de-register with the authorities, I had to wait until I ran that errand to box it up.

I plan to go to Vienna on Saturday, June 1, so on Friday, May 31, I go to the Registration Office to de-register from good old Ferdinand-Jergitsch-Straße 18. I fill out the form and hand it to the woman working at the office, who tells me that I've written down the wrong address. I tell her that she's the one with the wrong address, considering my personal knowledge of the subject. While she concedes the point, she also insists that I de-register from the house where I'm registered. I de-register from Ferdinand-Georg-Waldmüller-Straße 18, which I did not know existed until that precise moment, and continue on the day's errands.

After closing my bank account and failing an attempt to file my taxes, I go back home to pack up my school bag into my bright yellow Austrian Post box, reminding myself all the while to take out my passport before I send it back to South Carolina. I get back into my room, where I have the distinct, vivid memory of taking my passport out of the front pocket, placing it gently into a side pocket of my carry-on bag, throwing out other papers and various useless things which have accumulated in my school bag throughout the year, and checking the side pocket of my carry-on bag afterwards to make sure that I had, in fact, transferred my passport from the one bag to the other. 

All of this is pure fantasy. Two days before leaving Austria for good to travel into six countries in three and a half weeks, I mailed my passport home. 

Two days later, in Vienna, three hours before my flight is set to take off to Oslo, I'm walking to the car of the niece of one of my co-workers as she's about to drive me to the airport, when she jokingly asks me if I have my passport, because that's one of those questions you ask people under the reasonable assumption that they are not inept morons. Completely under the illusion that I had indeed, for one shining moment, acted as a competent individual and, at the very least, not mailed my passport home, I go to check the side pocket of my bag, expecting to pull out a passport in triumph and continue to the airport on my unstoppable march through northern Europe. In this hallucinatory state, however, I neglect to account for the fact that I am, indeed, me, and my triumphal passport presentation does not happen. Nor does it happen when I check the other side pocket, and right now me and Kati have found ourselves in a bit of a pickle, now haven't we.

The airport and consulate are in the same direction, so we get into the car and call the airline company to see whether or not I need a passport to get onto my flight. Unable to reach the airline company, we call the airport itself, and they helpfully hang up on me.

With this new information, we make the executive decision to go to the consulate. We find the consulate has closed an hour before, and call the number the sign outside tells us to call in such a situation. A woman picks up, and I explain that I have found myself without a passport (neglecting the whole "mailed it home" aspect) and need to catch a flight to Norway in less than three hours. She sets me up for an appointment the next day, but then says that, because Norway is in the Schengen Area, I "might be able to risk it." For Dave "Snake-Eyes" Wile, that's music to my ears. 

We go to the airport, and while waiting in line to check in to my flight, I check every single orifice of every bag in my possession, praying that my passport might reconstitute itself in my presence. Because it's too busy being halfway across the Atlantic Ocean, that doesn't happen. We get to the front of the check-in line, and I show the woman working the counter a photocopy of my passport that I travel with just in case I somehow lose my passport, laughably hypothetical though that scenario may be, and my Austrian residency permit, while Kati convinces her to let me onto the flight. After about 5 or 10 minutes of angering everyone behind me in line, I'm finally allowed to check in. By the time she weighs my bag, the check-in woman is too exhausted to give a damn that it's 5 kilos overweight. Against all odds, we're heading to Oslo. Buckle up, kids.

Who needs passports when you've packed plastic fish homeless men have given you?

I land in Oslo in the dead of night, or at least when the orange glow is at its lowest point on the horizon, avoid all passport controls, and cry silently into a $10 7-Eleven hotdog. I get to the hostel, sleep, and go sightseeing the next day, which was a Tuesday. Considering that I leave on Thursday morning, I decide that Wednesday should be a decent time to go to the American consulate and work this whole passport ordeal out.

I get to the embassy, where the guard tells me that everyone inside is too busy to deal with me, until I point out the gravitas of my situation, namely that "I've just lost my passport and am leaving for Stockholm at 7:30 AM tomorrow." He eventually relents, and the guy working the Passport and Emergency Services counter gives me some forms to fill out to formally claim a lost passport and to apply for a new one. Unfortunately, the earliest he can make an appointment for me is the next day at 8:30 AM. However, since I'm taking the train to Stockholm instead of flying, I "might be able to risk it." 

Off to Stockholm it is then, Snake-Eyes. While it's certainly easier to travel undocumented by train than by air, it's also not guaranteed that a vagabond such as myself could travel completely unharassed. Between Munich and Klagenfurt, for example, after a weekend spent prepping the LSAT via homelessness, I was woken up and subjected to an utterly ridiculous and dehumanizing search of my belongings and person by the border security to clear me of all suspicion of intentions of terrorism. This ride wasn't going to be a cakewalk. I buy a sandwich with the last of my Norwegian kroner from a woman with the voice of a Siren and head to the tracks.

I get on the train and pick out a nice seat in a booth for four with two sets of two seats facing each other and a table in between. We cross into Sweden, and no border control board the train. I'm feeling pretty comfortable about my transit situation, and start to relax and enjoy the Swedish landscape. Suddenly, some absolute fuckface does literally the worst thing one human being has done to another person in history. This complete asshole gets on the train, and with the two seats across from me perfectly unoccupied and two-thirds of a train to pick from, sits down right the fuck next to me.

Half of my vision of the Swedish countryside is now completely unavailable to me, obscured by this immaculate prick; I've got to deal with my thighs rubbing up against his inconsiderate fucking thighs; he's breathing all up and in my train air with that offensive mouth of his, that despicable affront to evolution. I am seething. I consider crawling under the table to sit on the other side of the booth, but decide that would be too drastic, and continue stewing in a white rage. I'm so angry I just go to sleep, and I don't wake up until someone taps me on the shoulder to inform me the train has reached its final destination in Stockholm.

Once I get to Stockholm, I find my hostel, and decide to go find the embassy before I'm informed that today is, perchance, Sweden's National Day. The Royal Palace is open to the public, there's gonna be a parade, it's about to be nuts in Stockholm; the passport affair can wait. 

Some members of the Royal Family waving hello to me.

The next morning I trudge on down to the embassy, where I once again do my "Hey, whoa, my passport's suddenly disappeared! How crazy is that?!" schtick, and this time the guard is just a prick to me. The embassy's busy dealing with the fallout from all the rioting business, so he can't give me an appointment until 9:30 AM on Monday, which just so happens to be the day after I'm scheduled to be in Copenhagen. Worse, he doesn't tell me I might be able to risk anything. In fact, when I suggest such a desperate maneuver, he strongly condemns any notion I have that I might be able to travel without travel documents, and tells me to go file a police report, reschedule my flights, and come back Monday. Certainly not one of the mavericks America's employed at their other embassies.

I go file a police report which says, translating from the Swedish: "Wile states that he lost his American passport in unknown ways; the passport was in one of his bags." If you consider it "unknown" how a human adult could mail his passport back to his home country two days before traveling, and also take into account the fact that the passport was indeed in one of my bags, which was in a box on its merry way stateside, then we can at least consider this a half-truth. 

I spend Saturday terrified about having to convince someone at the airport to let me leave Sweden for Copenhagen without a passport, and come up with a contingency plan should they find my arguments less than persuasive. I'd have to pay another $25 for the bus back from the airport, but then I would go to the train station and buy a ticket to Copenhagen, because people under 25 can apparently buy train tickets at reduced prices less than 24 hours before the train's departure times. It would cost some money, but certainly less than rescheduling a flight. Bottom line, security guard at the American Embassy in Stockholm: if I'm still in Sweden on Monday, it'll be in chains.

Sunday morning, I catch the bus to the embassy, roll out to the airport, and everything is self-check-in. The self-check-in kiosk even printed a checked-luggage tag out for me to put on my own damn bag. Just for future reference, adoring faithful, those tags are much more difficult to put on bags than the people who check your luggage would have you believe. It's a remarkably long sticker, and as soon as you lose your alignment, may God have mercy on your mortal soul. Needless to say, I lost my alignment faster than my '92 Camry does after a tune-up. The bar code's ended up on a different side of the tag than the destination airport code, parts of the tag have been squeezed into a bow-tie-macaroni-like configuration, I can't even pull off the damn receipt part of it without the whole mechanism descending into an absolute farce; it was pure chaos down there.

By comparison, this assault on aesthetics looks downright professional.

I'm embarrassed to show this shambolic display to the woman at the check-in counter. She begrudgingly accepts this mess of a tagged bag after I get it down to an acceptable weight, and sends me to security.

At security, my delusion that I would somehow get through the airport without being requested to show any form of ID gets predictably crushed. Luckily, I have a speech prepared for the moment. I pull out my passport photocopy, my Austrian residency permit, my application for a new passport from Norway, and my Swedish police report, and, handing them to the guy checking passports in respective order, let it fly. "I've lost my passport; this is a photocopy of my passport, this is a residency permit that says I'm allowed to be in Europe [no it doesn't], I've already started the application for a new passport, and here's a police report saying that the passport is lost." 

He checks the photocopy, and asks me, "Have you contacted your embassy?"

Oh no. A question. I hadn't been expecting that. End of the line, kid. 

Wait just a second there, Snake-Eyes, I think to myself, you actually have contacted your embassy. Hoping to avoid a situation like the ones I'd run into in all the other countries on my U.S. Embassies in Scandinavia World Tour '13, I actually sent an e-mail explaining my situation to the U.S. Embassy in Copenhagen (leaving out, of course, the detail that I knew good and well where my passport was) in an attempt to get an appointment for once before I was scheduled to leave a country. Sure, they never responded to it, but, if I've done nothing else, I have indeed contacted my embassy.

"Yes I have," I say, authoritatively, because now I'm in the driver's seat of this conversation. And just like that, he lets me through to the gate.  

Stockholm Arlanda Airport security.

I get to Copenhagen on a Sunday, so the embassy's closed. Monday morning, I waltz on up to the embassy, and the guard gargles something that I can't understand. I stand there silently and look confused at him. He repeats whatever he was saying in the same incomprehensible manner, and I keep on squinting at him in the same idiotic manner.  Somehow, on my walk to the embassy, when a policeman with a riot shield asked me something in Danish, at that moment I was perfectly capable of asking him to repeat himself; he asked me whether I'd seen a man walking around the cemetery with a sword (I had not, but I would let him know if I did). However, on this occasion, I did not have that degree of wherewithal.

I continue to stare dumbly at him, and finally he points me in a direction and tells me to go stand there. I go over there for a while, but then I realize that he just thought I was being an ass and wanted me to go be an ass in a location that wasn't directly in front of his face. It dawns on me that I should just ask him again, so I explain to him that I was not, in fact, intending to be an ass, but had just not understood him. He responds, slowly and deliberately, "What can I do for you?"

Ugh, that is so what he was saying. I explain my passport predicament, and he eventually lets me inside, telling the guard working the metal detector to make sure he speaks slowly to me. I get to the waiting room, and eventually my number gets called. I go to a desk and hand the woman there all my various documents and $135. She goes through them, and after a long silence, she looks up at me. "You don't have a passport?" she clarifies. "And you got through Norway, Sweden, and Denmark?"

"Yup!" I answer, proudly. The woman just sighs, the utter disgust with modern European border security measures palpable, and turns around to go file my paperwork. 

She comes back, and tells me that if I return to the embassy sometime between 9 AM and noon, I should have a replacement passport waiting for me. When I come back the next day, I mosey on through because I'm a rising star on the Scandinavian embassy circuit, and the consul signs my replacement passport into effect. 

After 8 days traveling, entering 3 different countries, visiting 4 consulates and skipping out on appointments set at 3 of them, lying and telling half-truths to 4 embassies, 2 airports, and 1 police force, I was a documented traveler once again. 

Despite the fact that a replacement passport looks faker than a pornstar's orgasm, I get in and out of Scotland without incident. I get into Iceland on June 21, and check into my hostel in Reykjavik. The girl working the check-in desk asks to see my passport, and I proudly present it to her, in the same manner I had intended to do three weeks prior while walking to Kati's car. I put it back in my bag and go upstairs to get my stuff settled in my room. Just on a hunch, I check to make sure my passport is still in my bag. It isn't. I check both side pockets, and empty them completely. I go rummaging through the main pocket, even though there's no way I put it there, and come up empty. 

I run back downstairs, and ask the girl if she ever handed me my passport back after I showed it to her. She replies that not only did she give it back, but she remembers me putting it back into a pocket in my bag. This is pure fantasy.

I go back and forth between the lobby on the second floor and my room on the fourth floor maybe three or four times, and still have no passport. I'm beginning to become pretty irked by the fact that my bag has developed a forcefield around it that not only rejects my passport, but convinces people that I've managed to put my passport safely within its confines. 

That's it, I realize. It hit the forcefield, bounced off harmlessly, and fell on the floor somewhere in the lobby. It's just science. I run back downstairs, and there, right underneath the front desk, lies my passport in all of its glory. I hold my passport up to the girl, sigh exasperatedly, turn around, and wordlessly go back upstairs while she chuckles at my carelessness. If she only knew.