Don’t Get Deported
Welcome to my random musings about the world, on a weekly-to-occasional basis.
Where we are: We’re in Raleigh, zooming between doctor visits and family visits and restocking underwear and deodorant.
Don’t Get Deported
Americans who go on ‘normal’ European vacations have perhaps only the vaguest notions of what the Schengen Area is, and the rules they’re expected to abide by. It’s understandable: Americans are permitted to remain in the Schengen Area for up to 90 days without a visa. So the average 14-day trip is completely frictionless, at least with regard to immigration control. You fly into a European airport, show your passport, the nice agent stamps it (don’t you love that sound—thud-click?), and off you go. You can stay in one country, fly to another, take the train across three borders, or go on a really whirlwind driving tour of six or eight countries (although, don’t—that’s too exhausting).
The Schengen Agreement is the wonderful law that makes travel between European countries (the ones that signed on) so easy.
The only caveat for me and Lee is that 90-day rule, and it’s a hard-and-fast one. Specifically, we can be in Schengen for up to 90 days in any 180-day period.
That, it turns out, can be a little tricky.
I like being in Europe. It’s easy, I know how things work, I can drink the water, medical care is good, there are sidewalks and trains and I’m not too worried about malaria or rabid dogs. Plus there are quaint medieval villages and museums jammed full of western art that I recognize and understand. What’s not to love? We’re not so keen on European winters, so that’s when we head to other parts of the world. But when Europe starts to warm up in spring, that’s where I want to be. I’d stay all the way through fall if I could, but that pesky 90-day rule throws a wrench in my hopes and dreams every year.
We’ve learned to do what lots of nomads call the ‘Schengen Shuffle’—stay 90 days, leave for 90, then go back and do it again. But sometimes we make things overly complicated.
Case in point: two years ago, we arrived in Italy (a Schengen country) in April, then bounced out (Algeria), then in again (Spain), then out again (Albania), then in again (Czechia), then out again (Scotland) in September. That was a period of five months, which is a lot more than 90 days, even when you account for the rolling start of the 180 day period (which is a mathematical equation that blows the top off my head every time I try to understand it—thank goodness there’s an app for that).
The problem happened sometime deep into month four, during a tight layover in Vienna (which happened to be the same layover where our luggage went AWOL for three weeks). I am usually the communicator at passport control. The very nice agent, just doing her job, asked when we had entered Schengen. I, just being me and intimidated by border control agents, started babbling about how we had entered in April, but then we had left, and come back, and I was rattling off countries and Lee was listening to the boarding calls for our flight, and all that agent heard was April, and we were deep in it. She was Austrian, and we had obviously overstayed and would have to be deported or arrested or … She got out a pencil and paper and laboriously combed through our passports, writing down all the entry and exit dates. Just beyond her, we could see people getting on our plane. We waited. She did math.
We made the flight, just. After we got seated, Lee looked at me and said, “You know, prisons are for people who can’t keep their mouths shut.”
I would not do well in prison. But I am also not very good at keeping my mouth shut. It’s a problem.
This year, our ‘Shuffle’ was simpler, because it was only one exit/entrance, but it was complicated because it was the Faroe Islands. The Faroes are not part of Schengen, but they’re sorta-kinda part of Denmark, which is part of Schengen. AND they didn’t stamp our passports when we arrived (even though we went to the airport immigration police and asked nicely), so we had no easy proof that we had exited Schengen. PLUS we were planning to exit Schengen via Germany, where rules are rules and paperwork is serious business. I was convinced it would all be fine, because we weren’t doing anything wrong, and everything is always fine, but Lee consulted a government lawyer in Faroe; she agreed that we should probably be worried. THAT DID NOT HELP. He collected receipts. He printed and collated every shred of evidence that we had been in Faroe. He printed pages from the government website, and created a folder of carefully organized documents. We bought highlighters and paper clips. He wrote a one-page summary, in bullet-points.The lawyer in him checked and double-checked. After all of my conviction that everything would be fine, because it always is, the anxiety in me had trouble sleeping the night before we departed.
And then, we sailed through immigration. The agent loved the one-page summary. I (mostly) kept my mouth shut. We were neither deported nor banned.
See? I was right. Everything was fine, because it always is.
Take care,
Lisa
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