"Lord, what fools these mortals be!"
-William Shakespeare
A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act II Scene III
As previously promised, here is the long overdue explanation of what happened to the defamed Saint Luc as he innocently attempted to re-enter Brussels after his very enjoyable holiday some three weeks earlier. Note: This entry does not fit in chronologically to the rest of my epic narrative. Instead, it should be placed between my fall break in Cairo and the ten day Balkans trip.
On an unremarkable, chilly Sunday morning in Brussels I arrived back only to be stopped at passport control. Upon seeing a rather large amount of stamps in Arabic on my passport, Mr Racist Belgian Checkpoint Official (not his actual name) decided that a further investigation was necessary. “What are you doing in Brussels?” asked Mr RBCO. I responded that I was a student. He then asked to see my residence card, which I did not have, as I had not obtained a student visa. After explaining this, he very cordially invited me to accompany his colleague to a side room to resolve the matter. There I became aware of a significant problem; namely, that I did not have a student visa, and that my tourist visa for the Schengen area had been overstayed by 53 days. I had assumed that with a tourist visa that was automatically extended to all US Citizens for a period of 90 days I would have no trouble entering and exiting the Schengen area. This assumption, though correct, had left out one crucial detail. I had spent most of the summer in Spain, and therefore my initial date of entry into the Schengen area was not 03 September 2010, but rather 14 May 2010. I had therefore been in the Schengen area for 143 days out of the past 164.
After a futile conversation with Mr Belgian Official on a Power Trip (a colleague of Mr Racist Belgian Checkpoint Official), I was interrogated by a third individual, who in fairness had a pretty miserable job. Seeing the Moroccan, Egyptian, Turkish, and UAE stamps on my passport made the officials rather uncomfortable, so they asked me a few questions about my travel plans and the purposes of my visits to these wonderful places. He asked my religion. He also asked if I had any Muslim friends. Sensing the predicament that I was in, my mind nevertheless wandered to one of the Muslim friends that I had visited in Egypt, with who I spent an afternoon exploring a rich collection of Mosques. I also thought of one of my previous roommates, a Pakistani Muslim with whom I had once celebrated Eid. “Not really,” I replied.
There were two options. Neither involved entering the country. The first was that the Belgian government would pay for my flight back to the previous airport from which I had arrived. Since that would be Henri Coanda in Bucharest, Romania, I opted to take option number two, Choose Your Own Adventure. Destiny (convenience, really) brought me to Londontown, where I enjoyed the gracious hospitality of the family of a certain Miss Saint Luc for a relaxing, leisurely week. Thanks to the ever loyal Duke of Landesberg I was able to skype in for most of my classes, and when I arrived back in Brussels a week later my Professor acknowledged that of all weeks I had selected the best possible one to miss.
Though I wish I could say I received a hero’s welcome, in reality my return was rather inconsequential. Many of my peers had fallen ill, so absences were high. Nevertheless, it was splendid to be back, and I enjoyed Brussels for a full five days before leaving on a ten day trip to the Balkans (of which the first leg was recorded in the previous post).
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