The Scottish Border

Some way along my trip planning, I foresaw that I would reach a limit of being able to maintain the stamina to enjoy a slew of cities across the continent. I figured that some time before meeting the parents and sister in Holland around the second week of August, I would have already reached some level of saturation — I was definitely aware from the start that my plan was ambitious. More than two months of mostly lone city hopping with my Eurail pass would likely be too taxing, and so I decided to try to shorten the nomadic phase of it to six weeks. A stationary last few weeks with minimal stimulus would likely be relieving not only at the time, but as a prospect during the intense six weeks proceeding.

I decided to pursue the Scottish Highlands as my peaceful landing place. Since there are no hostels nor any kinds of reasonably priced accommodations out there, I needed to find some unconventional means of lodging. So, I decided to email every bed and breakfast I could find on the internet and ask if I could work for them in exchange for room and board. I ended up emailing about 20 in total. A handful of them got back to me, all saying that for whatever reason such an arrangement could not be made.

But a few days after I sent out the mass email, the woman who owns a castle-made-into-a-bed-and-breakfast in the Isle of Mull responded, telling me that she’d be delighted to have me work and stay, and that her daughter would actually be gone for those three weeks I’d asked about, so she needed the help anyway. Fantastic. I would arrive in the middle of July, straight from Berlin, and would stay into the first week of August. And, in addition to room and board, I would get 10 euros an hour “and more if was good and quick.” The tasks would be housekeeping and serving breakfast and checking in the guests.

This was an instance of a pristine plan that serendipitously came together. I’d make some money up for what I’ve blown this summer, and I’d even have a concrete sense of purpose. And I was certainly apt in assuming that by this point I would yearn not only for some monotony but also for some structure.

And so, when I was sent back to Berlin at the Scottish border, I was quite distressed, disoriented, and paralyzed.

THE FIRST WRINKLE

The Scotland saga begins with my missing the original flight that I’d booked to Edinburgh. It was scheduled for July 16th at 6:35 AM, I remember exactly because I arrived at the gate at 6:34 AM. Between infrequent trains to the airport and an absurdly long security line (and my being passive and not sugaring someone up to let me cut them in line) I was doomed to miss that flight long before I was actually sprinting to the gate, still idiotically clumsily holding my computer and camera and toiletries bag in my hands upon bolting from security. 

I was very unhappy when I missed that flight. Even by flying to Edinburgh instead of taking trains, the journey was to be complicated. I’d booked a bus from Edinburgh to Oban which would leave a couple hours after I landed, where I’d booked a bed in the only hostel, from where I would at last get a ferry the next morning to the Isle of Mull. I’d lost all this money in addition to the airfare, and I felt excessively badly about changing my schedule on the kind castle lady.

After I retrieved my backpack from the lost and found in baggage claim, (I learned that they scan every piece of luggage before they load it onto the plane and check if the owner boarded, and if not they send the luggage to the lost and found; I was so panicked about my bag being stuck in Cologne (layover) when I finally found the lost and found that the woman had to explain this to me several times over) I bought another plane ticket for the next day, which was exactly twice the price of my original one. Tough.

Subsequently, to make the situation into a miserable “adventure” for myself, because I just had to indulge in my misfortune all the way, I decided to camp out in the airport for the next 28 hours. Though that decision of defiance toward.. something.. did not live long: shoutout to Margot, who made the reasonable and insistent suggestion to just find a hostel instead and return to the airport in the morning. 

I got a pretty solid count of sleep hours that afternoon and night and woke up the next morning with a little bit of motivation — enough so that carrying my sheets down to reception upon checkout was not a miserable chore. I got to the airport 3.5 hours early, though of course the security line was totally reasonable this time.

More misfortunes: But we landed in Edinburgh about an hour late, and it looked like I was going to miss the new bus I’d booked. A partial refund was to be given if one cancels more than an hour before departure, so I made the executive decision to cancel and plan to miss it rather than take the gamble and end up missing it AND paying in full. It was the last bus of the day, which meant that I would have to stay in Edinburgh that night and take a morning bus, meaning I’d be foregoing my second reservation at the Oban hostel. And THEN right after I canceled, I realized that we had just gained an hour traveling to the U.K. and I indeed would have made that bus, and I’d wasted a whole batch of money yet again. Head spinning wildly at this point. Well, I would have made that bus if I’d had my hair in a ponytail, so to say.

THE CURSES OF HAIR AND CASTLES

When I finally reached the front of the customs line, I was told to go to one of those automatic machines that scans your passport and takes a photo of you, and then, theoretically, matches the two and opens its little doors to let you pass and there you are free in the country without ever interacting with any customs menaces. But the machine was not cooperating with me, and the moment after I scanned my passport and glared at the little camera for the third time I realized that my hair must be too much in my face, and I prepared for the fourth attempt by putting my hair all the way behind my ears. But then the machine was already beeping and a little screen flashed orange letters “seek assistance.” A man immediately came over and told me to go to an actual customs booth with one of the trolls. Okay fine.

Even though I was certainly not in good spirits, I must still have been reasonably excited about working in a castle because when the man asked why I was entering the country, I said “I’m working in a castle!” Well, this was precisely the grave mistake. Because after a few cryptic questions he told me that in Scotland it is illegal to work, whether for money or for free, without a visa, even for a duration of a few weeks. Apparently this law is obvious to many of the people to whom I would later lament, but it had never crossed my mind. I realized that I had made a serious mistake when he stopped acting mechanical and slowed everything down, now just incredibly disconcerting, and I could feel with each passing second that I was not going to be released anytime soon. I was just getting deeper into my stupid mistake. He asked for the woman’s contact information as well as to see my agreement with her about our arrangement, which was just an email.

I started to feel horribly paralyzed because I had no idea whether any move of mine was worsening my case or could possibly remedy it. At first I told him that we had made the agreement over Zoom and I had no written description, because at that point I thought that if I proved I was going to be working for free there was a better chance they’d admit me into the country. He told me to sit on a bench which was smack in the middle of the huge customs area, while he went to the back to get in touch with the castle lady.

But after he’d left to contact her, I realized that if he reached her and she told him we had emailed about all of this, I’d be under even greater suspicion for lying. So I went up to some other customs guy and told him I’d totally forgotten that I was being paid because that was not my priority, and that I had the email saying so. He seemed to pity me already because he kind of sighed and told me to just wait and see what the guy on my case said when he came back. Let’s call my guy Brenson: a leech feeding off my ignorance.

THE MARKET PLACE (EXPOSURE)

Finally, Brenson and some subordinate guy came out to tell me that they would need to do a bag search “because they were keeping me in custody.” Oh. So we walked a few minutes, one on either side of me, many people staring, to a little bag check designated area. They kept going on about how heavy my backpack was, which gave me opportunity to be a little snarky. From what I knew thus far of Brenson’s character, I predicted the bag check would be an excruciatingly long process. 

Indeed, he opened and twisted up every single lipstick and chapstick tube, counted my money, examined my charging chords clearly with the suspicion that they could have been explosive devices, examined inside my little laundry bag for an almost laughably lengthy time, flipped through every page of each of my books and drawing notebooks, and so on. He made some weird unsettling comment about my “artsy-ness”. The other guy clearly just wanted to get the search done and clearly didn’t suspect me of anything more than planning to work in a castle, lacking a visa.

When Brenson got to my journal, which is something like a frightening object, I figured he’d flip through it, then realize it unnecessary (not to mention violating) to actually read anything, and set it back down. Like, who would actually do that in front of its owner. Ah, but I underestimated him. Brenson started to read my journal! This man was literally the first and only person to ever read one of my journals of this genre (namely, forbidden to all.)

My head started looping and I said, with my mind far away from my voice “I don’t believe this is legal” to which he responded, “oh, yes it is legal” and proceeded to comment on my writing. “So you are writing about your feelings and, uh…” I don’t remember what else he said. I wanted to wrench his shoulders off of his body and I couldn’t think of anything to say. And then I was genuinely frightened that he would come upon something that he would name something like “a threat to myself and/or others,” but he finally he put it down and continued on. In retrospect it’s kind of interesting to think about why he took time to read it. Quite surely he didn’t suspect me of anything for which reading my journal would provide informative.

An amusing moment in the bag check process was when he came upon my “herbal blend” smoking blend, which is indeed a mix of rose petals, spearmint basil etc. I’d forgotten I had that, and if I’d remembered I actually might have thrown it out along with the bag of what I knew would certainly not aid my case in order to make matters… simpler? (Though this would have actually been impossible because the herbal blend was packed deep in my Miscellaneous Packing Cube in my backpack, while the other bag was, thank goodness, in my tote bag which I inconspicuously took with me to the bathroom right before they commenced the invasion.) But he did not even unzip the herbal blend bag! The basic European packaged tobacco, on the other hand, was incredibly suspicious to him. They also let me keep my bread knife and large bottle opener. The whole thing was so absurdly arbitrary.

Of course Brenson had a ball with my plethora of pills, though he actually took most interest in my ziplock bag of purple women’s multi vitamins. I told him I was more than happy for him to take one, which he ignored. So I flexed and rambled on about each medication, drippingly sarcastic, while he struggled to spell out each one on his record sheet. 

I believe it had been about 30 minutes when they finally reached my three packing cubes with clothing. The other guy, bless him, who had just been oddly hanging around and making bemusing comments, announced that it was all only clothing and that they should just wrap the search up, to which Brenson actually agreed. We all have our limits. Again, how arbitrary all that stuff is — surely I would more likely have something horribly forbidden hidden among my clothing in my packing cube then in my chapstick, and they must know that too. 

All my stuff was scattered on the table like the work of a hurricane, and they silently watched me pack everything back up. The subordinate made some pathetic comment about Tetris. I felt quite like they had yanked off all my clothing because I felt so exposed, and putting my clothing back on was not making me feel any less exposed because all my senses of possession or right to privacy were already stripped and everything was documented, literally. The experience made me feel so weak because not only did I have nothing on them, but there was no space for the illusion that I did. Even if I had successfully hidden my greatest treasure, in their eyes they had just successfully examined every part of me that they wanted to, and they had completely broken through the impasse to what I carry.

The way I turned to sarcasm is interesting, though. For some reason it made me feel like I was behind something, like some kind of veil. The subtlety of sarcasm is also protective.

Then they walked me back to my beloved bench smack in the main area, where another plane of people was just arriving and pervading the room. A couple was now on my bench too so I briefly had some companionship, but after about 15 minutes they had been released and again it was only me looking ambiguously faulty. Every 10 minutes or so, someone would come to give me a form to sign acknowledging that I was being kept by the border authorities, or take it back, or ask me more questions about the contents in my bag. At one point a woman came with a pathetically flimsy cup of water and told me that they could not give me any food Ok.

Then Brenson came over and said, kind of like a body builder who has never interacted with children who is speaking to one for the first time, that anything I tell him stays private with the border police (what?) and asked why I take so much medication. Ha.

At last, I was told that I was being taken to another facility that would be more comfortable and where they could also give me food. Delightful.

Here is a photo I snuck of Brenson, looking far more like a body builder than he actually did, leading me to the transport vehicle. (He’d probably like it.)

THE PRISON WINDOW

Here I am in the jail cell car in which they transported me to the off-site facility. At this point in the process I was in that rare, kind of hyper mood that is induced by accelerated exasperation: when you’re temporarily able to indulge in a repressive situation as being absurd and very funny.

The new facility was bound to be a significant improvement from my bench in the customs hall because, Brenson told me, the people working there had no connection to the border police nor anyone from the airport — it was just a holding facility where they looked after people being detained. I’d never heard of such a thing. But still upon my arrival they tagged my bags and asked for my phone out of my pocket, “because I would have no reason to contact anyone until after the process was over, when I knew the outcome,” and took everything to another room. Nice. This is the first page of the packet that Brenson gave me right when I arrived. Thus, unfortunately, no visuals on record after this one.

Then a woman peppily showed me the room in which I’d end up being detained for the next 5 hours, which had “books” (exclusively Bibles), home magazines, coloring books and absolutely dysfunctional coloring pencils, and three accordion mattresses that were piled up in the corner, among a ton of other junk. The walls were curiously covered with elementary posters about religion, and a few maps of Scotland. There were even eye masks, which I assume are for the people they keep overnight, and I had a hunch that the horribly fluorescent lights never got turned off. (I spent quite some time looking for a switch to no avail.)

All the staff were kind to me and gave me some horrendous microwaved beef filled pasta shells, and the orange and apple juice cups and the fruit in jelly that they give you at hospitals, and some repulsive cold English Breakfast tea with huge excess of milk. There was also a snack box on the table with “croissants” filled with things like chocolate cream, strawberry jam, and caramel. There were also ginger snaps, shortbread cookies, and digestives. At one point I was so bored that I had a sampling of them all. One can probably guess my evaluations.

But the most notable part of the room — the most amusing if one can find some humor in the situation — was the big window that they have in the rooms in crime shows (and real life, of course), where the prisoner or other being kept inside sees it only as a mirror while anyone on the other side can see in. It was pretty disconcerting, but I used the opportunity to put on a variety of strange dispositions, first acting gleefully juvenile when I fetched a coloring book and tried to color with mocking focus, then acted extremely serious as I selected five bibles from the selection, stacked them one on top of the another, chose one methodically, and started reading with my face very close to the pages. Then I piled up all of the mattresses, chose another Bible edition, reclined on the stack and read my Bat Mitzvah portion, Vayeshev, aloud, which is about Jospeh in Egypt and his brothers coming to him, not recognizing him for their brother, for grain in the midst of the famine in Cana’an. 

THE INTERVIEW

After a couple hours of these antics, Brenson came in (it was kind of strange to see him in there among the bibles and coloring books, kind of like as a child seeing one’s teacher outside the classroom) and told me it was time for my official interview. Cool. At this point I was kind of numb to the whole situation — my anxiety about what would happen was now vague, as was my piercing frustration at myself for not simply saying something like “I’ve come to Scotland to explore the country and will stay in hostels,” or realizing seconds sooner that my hair was too much in my face, and at this point I felt too degraded to feel justified in my anger about the journal reading and the medication question.

Even my memory of it all thus far had turned kind of foggy because I was delirious with the immersion of the whole situation. (It took me hours upon hours to write this post because I’ve had to recall and piece together all the content I retained.) But this was actually a favorable state in which to enter the interview because I didn’t really have emotional pulls that skewed my attempt at being a supreme interviewee-detained-at-a-country’s-border. Ultimately, the question was whether I’d be admitted into the country (and promise not to work), or be sent back to Berlin on the next departing flight.

Believe it or not, Brenson started the interview telling me that I seem like a nice girl and that he wants to help me, but that ultimately the decision is up to his boss. That was really surprising because up to then he had shown no emotion other than repressed frustration, nor any concern for anything outside of his duties. And further, I certainly hadn’t acted pleasantly toward him. But I did appreciate that comment and it made me feel better to see him relax into an actual person — it is also interesting that it took his loss of executive power that brought out this side of him. Now he simply had a job to do, and just wanted to be home with his daughter (which he stated sometime later during the interview) and, apparently, to arrive at a decision that was just.

Still, I did not know how to frame anything during the interview. Do I emphasize or deemphasize that I was relying on the money I would make at the castle to finance my trip? How adamant should I be about not having known this law about needing a work visa? How strongly should I defend the castle woman? And at this point, did I even want to spend the next few weeks in Scotland if I didn’t have this work arrangement? On the other hand, my uncertainty about the answers to these questions made the uncertainty of the outcome of the situation feel more manageable, like there wasn’t such a discrepancy between what should be and what could be.

I could tell by the end of the interview that my answers didn’t seem to change his impression of the situation much, though I do think I placed myself closer in his favor with my expressions of curiosity and passion about the beauty of the country. Then he brought me back to my room and locked the door, and I lay on the mattress stack, wearing an eye mask, blindly flipping the pages of yet another Bible edition. For perhaps another hour (there was no clock in the room, obviously) I rotated between the spread of activities I’d set up for myself over the last few hours. I also thought about where would be best to go if I indeed got sent back to Berlin, and started to try to reconcile the possibility of that result.

Finally, Brenson came back in the room and sat down at the table, and I joined to face him, and he told me that I was being sent back to Berlin. He seemed genuinely sorry to tell me that. Then he said that he had to do more paper work, and left and locked the door.

INSPIRATIONS FROM PEARL (kindly appreciate my attempts at a Scarlet Letter theme)

Even though I had already started the process of preparing myself for this result during the hour leading up to Brenson’s telling me, the shock was still immense. It would have been a pitiful reaction to cry in there, blind and visible, so I got some paper and a degenerate colored pencil and proceeded to make 5 fortune tellers, all filled with curses, such as: “you will be choked by a crowd of cocaine-doused poppies” (I figured this would not excite the staff who would come upon them when they were cleaning the room after my departure, though it would of course be a blessing to some) and “you will be admitted to the Bellevue Hospital psych ward indefinitely” (a likely missed reference, this was more of a personal release), and “you will become physically indistinguishable with one of your parents — your choice” and “you will reproduce with the world’s holiest white cow; and mythological history will repeat itself” (a reference that could also go missed). I did have the slight fear that my fortunes would be read before I left on the flight the next morning, and that they would bring me back to the facility to investigate my mental fitness to continue my travels unsupervised; (though that would certainly embellish this whole tale), and it seemed pretty unlikely, and so I spread the the fortune tellers out gracefully around the table instead of hiding them among the croissants, which I did initially.

Finally Brenson came back, and I made sure to exaggerate my delirium and dissociation, and he handed me all of my forms, some of which I had to sign to give my acknowledgement that they had held me in detention, which was basically them giving me the illusion that I gave consent for letting them do so? Unclear. Then there was the whole question of where I would stay that night until my 9:30AM flight back to Berlin. The Edinburgh hostel I’d booked when I thought I’d miss the bus to Oban (but be admitted into the country) was too far from the airport for the trips there and back to be worth it — at this point it was after 10PM. Brenson suggested the hotel across the airport. I asked if they would pay and he said no, but that it was pretty cheap. I searched it up and it was 230 pounds, which I announced disdainfully, I hope. So I decided to just camp out in the airport — finally I got my wish.

I had finally collected all my things from the facility and Brenson and I were just heading back to the airport, when he realized he hadn’t taken my fingerprints, which was apparently required because I was “let out on bail.” So back we went, where the process took about 20 minutes because the system was so belligerent. Eventually the original subordinate, who had appeared out of no where, (“long time no see,” I said cascadingly sarcastically) got it done and Brenson was actually considerate enough to show me to where I would check in the next morning, upon which he wished me the best before leaving awkwardly.

Livid and composed.

Finally I got to collapse on some grass outside the airport, lose composure, and utilize some calming substances. When I went back inside, other stranded people had already claimed all the benches in the entrance area, so I spent the night on the floor next to an outlet, recalling the last train of my original trip to Berlin.

What you’ve all been waiting for:

And the official mark of shame:

AFTERMATH AND DEVISING PLAN B

I can’t remember anything about my trip back after surrendering on the floor until I arrived in the late morning at a hotel, where on the way to my room I had some incomprehensible interaction in Spanish with a woman and her daughter who, it seemed, were cleaning rooms, but the whole thing was feverishly strange.

There seems to be something about arriving in Germany absolutely deprived of nourishment; here is the spread I purchased:

At this point, my great stressors were jointly obsession about how everything had failed solely because of my minuscule idiotic actions, as well as uncertainty about my next moves, when I had mentally prepared for such certainty and security from this point on in my journey. I also felt guilt about feeling as I did about my situation; how many people dream of being alone in Europe with no responsibilities, with the option to go absolutely anywhere? Even before this whole fiasco, right before I was to. leave Berlin, I felt drained of having so little structure, even knowing that soon I would have some, and tired of having to fight so hard against loneliness. Now I felt tenfold more drained and I was assigned with coming up for myself some kind of arrangement for the next few weeks, as well as having to resume dealing with the everyday demands of being on high alert and having at least some level of ambition that one needs when traveling alone.

After some hours of anguish in the hotel room, I conceived the idea to go on a silent retreat in Scandinavia. Reminiscent to when I had missed my flight and decided I should stretch the suffering into a most arduous adventure by camping in the airport, here I wanted to stretch certainty’s abandonment into getting lost inside of my mind by way of some kind of “restorative” madness. I really was interested in the restorative aspect, but here the means to get there — a silent retreat — was a bit… questionable in terms of my own best interest. At this point I was also so much in need of some reliable company, of which I was aware, that a silent retreat probably really would be corrosive.

Fortunately I could not find a Scandinavian silent retreat, so I revised my plan to attending a Scandinavian yoga retreat. I probably also internalized that my silent retreat plan was a bit melodramatic and there was no reason to cause myself further strife, albeit sure to be torturously romantic. There weren’t many options, but after a few obsessive hours I found one in the middle of Norway several hours from Oslo for a very reasonable price that had no reviews nor website, and its sparse description mentioned that everyone wakes up at 4:00AM because it is then, before people are awake, that the air is not crowded with their energies, and thus it is the best time for cleansing. I booked it right away.

I had 13 days until it began on July 31st, and then I remembered that my mother’s cousin Ada lives in Copenhagen, which would make geographical sense. The prospect of landing myself in the home of a family member, whoever it was, seemed ideal. So I asked Ada if I could stay with her for an indeterminate amount of time. She quickly responded to my message saying that she would be more than happy to host me and would be ready for my arrival in two days. (I still needed another day to get back into some kind of functional sleep routine, and then the other for travel.) One of Ada’s fine qualities is her generosity and loyalty when it comes to family, and this has been evident to me since I was a young child. She was always interested in family history and loved family gatherings, and always wanted to be involved with keeping everyone in touch. So I am very grateful that she came to my aid.

The journey was a royal pain as usual, with multiple cancelations and delays (at total odds with what one would expect of German trains), but when I arrived in Copenhagen at 1:00AM Ada was on her way to scoop me. How I felt seeing her step out of her car felt pretty much like the epitome of relief.

—

I must say: I certainly hope I never experience this extremity of unfair treatment again, but it was valuable to experience first hand at least an extent of what many people experience routinely. It’s definitely not a reality that one can really understand until it is actually happening.