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August 31, 2005
schengen
or, how Chris forgets his passport. Again.
The holiday was frought before it started. The day before, I realised I hadn't had a confirmation number for my hotel, and a quick email later, the hotel company decided I didn't have a booking. After staying in the Skt Petri in Copenhagen, I had decided to splurge on a rather chi-chi hotel in Venice, so I booked through design hotels, who also had an offer on making it almost within the realms of wallet possibility to stay. Their website gave me a booking completed screen, but no email was sent afterwards. In other words, design hotels suck. At least their website and confirmation process sucks. Also, whilst friendly in the email flow, I really don't think offering to book hotels in other cities is really what I wanted to hear.
So, anyway, I found a good deal on a pretty chi-chi hotel. I can really recommend the Palazzo Selvadego - incredible location, some very good deals, and a very decent room (it's a seperate extension to the Hotel Monaco, so there's no room service, but you do get to have breakfast in the main hotel with a rather splendid view).
After the hotel incident, I had a feeling it was a doomed holiday. I also got a taxi driver that wanted to talk (only the second in Finland that I have thankfully encountered. I didn't get given the phone number of this one though. A long story.) The holiday's doomedness increased many hundreds of percent with the (now feared) question "Can I see your passport?"
"Oh no." Cue blood draining from face, mouth dropping, and the thought that, once again, I am the stupidest person alive.
Like the other time this happened, the passport-forgetting was due to a combination of factors: etickets, and a rearragement of my living room. For about a year after I forgot my passport at Heathrow, I kept it in my rucksack, but it was starting to get a bit battered, so I took it out and put in in the canonical Passport Lives Here space in my living room. A memory space that disappeared due to having my windows replaced.
If I'd had 10 more minutes, I would have got in a cab, and done the round trip home. I only had 50 minutes until takeoff (normally an age in Helsinki airport terms), so that wasn't an option - the round trip from and to Heathrow took about 4 hours if I recall correctly.
The check in assistant added "or an ID card?". Hmmm. Shaking, due to the adrenelin rush, I got out my Finnish ID card. I showed it to him. He said that was fine. I flipped it over, and pointed at the NOT A VALID TRAVEL DOCUMENT line. He read it, and pointed at the line above saying THIS IS A VALID FINNISH IDENTITY CARD. He pressed buttons on his computer and showed me on screen that a passport or a valid identity card was required. "This is fine.", he repeated.
I live in a strange half-world of national identity. I am a permanent resident of Finland, but a UK national. The ID card proved I was who I said I was, maybe proved I had the right to reside in Finland, but didn't prove my nationality (the card has XXX as my nationality). This is probably quite a rare situation, falling through the cracks of Finnish and EU law.
When boarding the flight, the attendent gave me a grilling about the card. "You have your passport as well?" Apparently my ID card is a different colour than 'proper' Finnish national cards, to indicate my half-status. After a strange moment, he waved me on, muttering something about "the authorities will have a problem".
Let me say, what I did was probably illegal. Somewhere. Somehow. In many European countries, you have to be able to prove who you are. I have no idea if that extends to proving your nationality. So, it's a stupid idea to travel without a passport. Carry your passport.
Not that it mattered from there on in. Connecting in Germany, there's no need to produce ID when boarding a flight (Lufthansa even have self-service boarding, just by pushing your boarding pass through a turnstile gate). At the hotel, they happily accepted my ID card for all the paperwork. Coming back, again the ID card was fine. I guess I fell through a crack in the system.
UK subjects will probably wonder about passport control. Well, there isn't any - not within most of Europe. Schengen rocks. I just have to prove my identity to the carrier. No police or government passport control before boarding, or after landing, is allowed within the Schengen area (most of the time). I schengened. I thoroughly got my schengen on.
(A note about ID cards. In general, I am not against the cards themselves. I am against huge databases behind ID cards, police powers for random stop-and-show, and mandatory use for access to government-run services. In Finland, it doesn't work like that. You do, however, need to show some ID for any credit card purchase over 50 Euro - the other reason my passport was battered - and to be able to prove your identity when requested. I'm unsure if they can ask for that without good reason. Regardless, it's far easier to trust the Finnish government with the details of my life, weirdly, than the British one.)
After all that, I can get on to the purpose of the visit: the art biennale. More soon.
Comments
Passports and identity cards are not the most cooperative of all objects. Typically, they also want to stay abroad longer than us. Last time I was traveling, my ID card (driving licence) decided to stay in Bologna. I think that was the first time when I thought that it would actually be cool if I could just prove my identity with my index figer.
Posted by: Ulla-Maaria at September 2, 2005 10:46 AM
I've found the Design Hotels site to be a bit flaky, too. In this day and age, it's just not that difficult a thing to do. I think you should drop them a line (I did) and see what they say.
Posted by: Martin Little at September 5, 2005 04:27 PM
Living in a similar half-state, I note that my US driving licence (or rather, 'driver's license') is much more 'valid' ID than my UK passport. Even though the former is only an accidental ID.
I suppose there's a notion of hierarchical identification: you presumably needed your UK passport and/or birth certificate to get your Finnish ID card. But it's not really a hierarchy; it's a self-validating network that's often circular in nature.
Of course, that poses two issues: the steps required to get into the circle legitimately (in the US, the drivers license and social security number) and the steps required to sneak into it. And one more: the accidents necessary to fall out of that self-verification -- identity theft, the loss of a critical document, statelessness etc.
There's an interesting meshing of the kind of social identity that Nokia and others work on -- radiating outwards, networked, always under revision -- and the one that's institutional, defined by that networked circle of official documents and numbers.
Posted by: Nick at September 8, 2005 03:11 PM
