the tumbls and rumbls of my life

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I belong to the new Europe generation of ‘82 and I remember my first passport.

I was little enough to be piggy backed on my mom’s documents and I always thought it funny that a child up to a certain age could travel with an extra photo sticked into a parent’s passport. When I turned around 5 years old I was old enough to be brought to a photo studio in a checkered shirt and a sleeveless checkered vest of bluish pattern combinations to take my first - that I can remember - official documents photo. That one stayed with me till I was almost 10, then I got the new country’s passport, a blue Slovene passport. As a growing child I needed to change the photo one more time when I was around 14 years old and when I turned 16 i added a personal identity card to that as well. That year I think it was that we established a new border system with all of the four neighboring countries which allowed us to pass the borders with id cards only, and I got a new passport for longer travels - I think it was red. When I turned 18, the passport data changed and I got a new one, actually the one that is still with me today. We’ve been through a lot together. I always had it with me for a backup to the id-card, since it soon after issuing lost it’s relevance in Europe and took it to some other continents.sometimes escorted by a formulair of entry to a country, sometimes it just got stamped.

Now this end of winter i was facing a whole new world. A world I hardly could imagine with my almighty “it’ll get me anywhere” Slovene passport. The US wanted me to have a Visa. And I’m not talking about the credit card - that’ll be in one of the next blogs. I decided to follow my heart and move to New York for a half a year and suddenly there was an unfamiliar force saying i can only if they let me. Imagine the shock! what do they mean if they let me? I need to ask for approval to live somewhere? They would actually say no to another person spending in their economy? I was lost. It’s not like I planned to take from their job pool - that I could potentially maybe understand, but hey! I’m a 26year old European - we don’t really get the concept of closed borders. We’ve never experienced the iron curtain, the east/west block stuff or any restrictive system whatsoever. All of our lives there have been countries forming agreements to facilitate the free border crossing, tearing down physical barriers and opening the roads, connecting territories and spreading the free flow of intellect and workforce, mixing the cultures and acknowledging diversity inside a more and more unifying bureaucratically fluid system. So there I was. Lost in space. looking at the embassy’s page and trying to figure out why would they want to know my “clan”. Needles to say everything was wrong with my application process and I felt functionally illiterate. I’ve experienced enormously high stress levels and severe anxiety attacks fearing failure to attain permission to enter the states for more than 89 days in any 6 months.

When the d-day came, I was armed with everything. and I mean a lot of stuff. all sorts of documentation that would prove the person at the other side of the counter that I was not going to harm their system and remain a loyal citizen of Europe. The procedure was over in less than 15 minutes and it took me another 15 minutes to realize that they have said I should pick up a visa the next day between 1 and 3pm. The relief was tremendous and the shock of realizing the fact that our generation was born and raised in an exceptional time-space bubble of super national ideals will never since leave me.

Now I have this printout glued in my passport and it’s still up to the border immigration officers to let me in and out of the country (the second one being slightly less problematic I think). Oh yes, and there’s another piece of paper I got at the border, that I should not loose before leaving the land of the free.

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