Well, now I’m alone.

Owing to the vagaries of visa laws I can only spend half my time in most of Europe.¹ Which necessarily means I have to spend half of my time outside of Europe. Up until now I’ve been able to stay with friends most of my travels, and only a day or two on my own. But I can’t rely on that forever.

The plan was always to hop around Europe for short periods and balance that with slightly longer periods outside of the Schengen Area. Since Croatia’s applied to be a part of Schengen, but hasn’t been accepted yet, why not start there?

The only problem with this plan (if it is a problem) is that I don’t know nearly as many people outside the EU as in the EU. So for the next three weeks, I’m on my own. No crashing with a friend for a few days, no meeting up for dinner or inadvertently late crawls through cocktail bars. Maybe I’ll meet some people. Stranger things have been known to happen. But I think mostly I’ll be holed up in a rented apartment, occasionally hit some of the tourist sites, and otherwise stick close to my computer.

This could be great. I’ve been rather intensely in the face of people for the past two months, sharing hotel rooms or sleeping on couches, going out to eat with friends, playing in a few emotionally intense larps. I’m incredibly introverted. I’ve been overdosing on social interaction, and I can really use some time where I can do exactly as little as I want. Zero demands.

But I know, from experience, that it’s pretty easy for me to spend a bunch of days without any human interaction. Sometimes without even going outside. This can start to get depressing, which feeds this cycle of feeling down, so I eat badly and stay inside, which makes me feel worse, and the next thing I know it’s been a week and the only thing I have to show for it is a week’s worth of takeout food containers.

Best for me, emotionally, would be to better mix the two. Head to interesting places where I know a bunch of people (Paris! Amsterdam! Berlin!). Stay for a couple weeks. Do sightseeing on the weekends, arrange to hang out with people in the area 2–3 times. But then you run into the whole visa thing, so I guess I’m gonna have to cram my social interaction into one long stretch and my isolation into another one.

It’s this sort of thing that makes you start to wonder about the point of all these restrictions. It’s difficult to remember that passports and the security infrastructure that surrounds them are shockingly recent inventions. Passports and visas within Europe had basically died out with the invention of rail travel. It was World War I that saw their reintroduction, all in the name of security.

As for the United States, in 1907, over 1,000,000 immigrants passed through Ellis Island on their way to settling in the country. No passports, no visas, no papers. People would verbally provide information when they boarded the ship in Europe, and would present that information when they landed. Open borders didn’t exactly destroy the country.

Passports are tools used to track and control your population. They aren’t necessary. It’s no accident that the phrase “Papers Please!” became kind of a signifier of the Nazi regime; passports are part and parcel of nationalism, a way to identify who really belongs in your country and who gets second-class status. There’s a reason the police in the United States can’t demand you produce your identification without cause, and a reason conservatives are so keen on bills like Arizona’s SB 1070.² It’s all about control.

Ever since I first considered traveling, I’ve spent a lot of time researching visas and visa requirements. And all the while, I’ve been trying to figure out what the point of the visa restrictions are. Take my situation. I’m not looking for work. I’m renting rooms or paying for hotels. I’m spending money in local restaurants, and I’m putting money into the local economy. And yet, I’m still forced to spend half my time outside the bounds of the Schengen Area, and I’ve simply no idea why.

Next: Split (SPU) to Zagreb (ZAG)
Prev: Kopaniec to Prague

Footnotes

¹ Specifically, the Schengen Area, which permits tourist visas for 90 days out of any given 180 day stretch. It’s not quite the same as the EU (Norway and Switzerland are in Schengen but not the EU, while Ireland and Croatia are in the EU but not in Schengen, for example) but it’s pretty close.

I typically say “Europe” as shorthand for “within the Schengen Area.” No offense intended to anyone offended.

² That’s the one that requires law enforcement to check the immigration status of people when there’s a “lawful stop, detention or arrest” and there is “reasonable suspicion” they’re in the country illegally. The law has since been amended to prevent checks based on “race, color or national origin” which kind of makes you wonder what they’re using for reasonable suspicion. Lots of hunches, I guess.