My cousin, his girlfriend and their canine companion arrived in a fancy new VW van that I couldn’t wait to try out. It turned out that driving it was so enjoyable I had no choice but to appropriate the wheel for most of the ride from Berlin to Slovenia. My cousin, who was somewhat sleepy due to the few days of relatively moderate merrymaking in Berlin, had no objections. Cruising swiftly and comfortably through the plains of Germany as well as over the Alpine parts of Austria got me thinking that I certainly wouldn’t have anything against owning one of these things… But then again, I don’t really need a van, nor do I find the idea of paying almost as much for it as for our new flat on Tenerife particularly attractive. Unless I just bought one and lived in it, like so many people in fact do on the Canaries. Anyway – thanks to my cousin’s local connections, renting the VW van for a couple of days was very affordable, so this leg of the whole epic “quest” went through smoothly and without making too much of a dent in our budget.
Unloading the junk we wouldn’t need on the Canaries was not the only thing we had to take care of in Slovenia. We had already “exited” the Slovenian system a while ago, but we still had to inform the Slovenian authorities and tax administration of our new address, which we could now do with the newly-acquired Spanish documents.
What had seemed like a couple of run-of-the-mill bureaucratic chores began with a hilarious (or severely annoying, depending on how you look at it) affair of inscribing our new address into our passports. The fact that our address now contained a tilde over an “n” caused premature balding, greying, and nervous fidgeting in an unsuspecting administrative unit official. After a multitude of calls to higher-ups, consultations with the police, and a prolonged coffee break, the official confirmed what I had already suggested at the very beginning: that the horrifyingly unnerving “ñ” should simply be transcribed as “n”, because otherwise, supposedly, “the scanners wouldn’t be able to make sense of the address”. It was completely beyond me why anyone should optically “scan” anything in a biometric passport; or how foreign authorities are able to scan the Slovenian č, š, and ž; or what Slovenian scanners make of, say, Norwegian diacritics.
When the passports with the necessary changes came back a day or two later, the poor official realised she had made a mistake of overlooking a stray ñ in the relevant forms, which resulted in our passports now containing what was (theoretically?) considered a “scanner-incompatible” address. The official then proceeded to suffer a minor nervous breakdown: unsure what to do with our newly improved (or invalidated?) passports, she succumbed to panic instead of proposing any solutions, but we told her that we’d take the much-needed documents as they were, as I was completely sure that we’d never ever have any problems with anyone gazing upon the infernal tilde and immediately foaming at the mouth. Needless to say, of course we haven’t encountered any problems with that to date: if the authorities do ever scan anything at all, then they surely read the damn chip with the relevant information. After all, what’s the purpose of biometric passports otherwise (let’s leave the collection of more or less plausible Big Brother conspiracies aside for a moment)? Besides, who cares if the address contains a “ñ”, a “đ” or an “ø”. In fact, the Slovenian alphabet doesn’t contain any xyw-s – or ü-s or ß-s, for that matter – and nobody has, to my knowledge, perished or been prevented from entering Slovenia because of these evil letters to date. But yes, I do imagine how orthographic diversity might present an insurmountable glitch in the rather restricted programming of bureaucrats.
Fortunately, neither the official at the tax office nor the clerk at the bank, where I had to update my address as well, didn’t even blink as they simply typed “n”. For crying out loud…
With the newly-improved documents and a forwarding address registered everywhere that it had to be registered by law, we were now once again free to vacate Slovenia, which we did merrily after visiting our families, attending a really great (if somewhat belated) get-together with my oldest pals and fellow musicians in Maribor, and staying with a friend in Ljubljana for a few days.
The trip back to Berlin did not go smoothly, though. We booked an airport shuttle from Ljubljana to the Treviso airport (with the GoOpti airport transfer service, which I can only recommend wholeheartedly), because for some reason all low-cost airlines had cancelled their flights to Berlin from the Austrian Klagenfurt and Graz airports, which would have been much more convenient for us. Unfortunately our van got stuck in two monumental traffic jams on the Italian highway: the first one was caused by a truck spilling wheat all over the road; and the second – the two-hour stop – resulted from two trucks crashing into each other immediately after the first mishap (probably both drivers were distracted by all the gluten a few kilometres earlier, which must have caused spasms, anxiety attacks, or near-death experiences in the multitudes that are so suddenly stricken down with gluten intolerance these days).
Needless to say, six of us who were travelling to Berlin missed our flight. One booked a room and decided to stay near Treviso, while the driver took the remaining five of us to Venice in time for the next Easyjet flight (which was very kind of him, as rescuing us was certainly not his duty). Unfortunately that flight had already closed, but we did get tickets for the first available flight – which would depart early next day. Thus we had no choice but to spend a night in Venice. As cheesily romantic as that sounds, four of us chose to simply stay at the airport, as nobody apart from a particularly adventurous Macedonian with extra energy left in his batteries was particularly eager to lug the luggage onto a boat to “actual” Venice, only to potentially screw something up yet again and even exacerbate the situation. The adventurous Macedonian did head “downtown” (or downsea?) in order to spend some extra cash, but returned exhausted in the middle of the night without having anything worthwhile to report (apart from the fact that beer there was no more expensive, but not cheaper either, than at the bar nearest to the airport). Meanwhile, the four of us just loitered around the airport building and its immediate vicinity, passing the time by chatting, sniffing out electrical outlets that actually worked, as well as locating a suitable bench, carpet or any quiet spot where we could pass out without being trampled on. Late in the evening I even got some translating done, while laptop batteries lasted (no, we had not found any unoccupied electrical outlets that worked), after which I had the fortune of dozing off on a marble bench with my head stuck in a flower bed. The night smelled like a chapel of rest. Good times!
Next morning, trying to shake off the whiplash, the five of us finally arrived to Berlin. Monika and I sleepwalked home and took the day off to catch some much-needed shuteye after all the sleepless nights back in Slovenia and then the bonus misadventure at the Venice airport. All the boxes that we had yet to pack did in fact wait without complaining too much.
