So, when you enter Europa via CDG, from the US at least, and you remain in the international transit part of the airport, the passport check is...well, there isn't one. At all. I had thought this was fairly typical (except in the U.S., of course, where we try to maximize hassles for travellers).
I thought little of the fact that the "passport control" on my entry into Prague, from CDG, was also desultory. The guy was waving US passports through like it was rush hour and he was a traffic cop. Didn't scan my passport, didn't even open it.
Today, I tried to leave. Got a car from Bratislava to Wien, and then flew Wien to Amsterdam. And tried to cross through passport control, leaving the Schengen area to go to a connecting flight to the non-Schengen area. The Dutch passport guy, leaved through my passport, and announces, as if it were a movie, "Sir, you are in Europe illegally!
And suddenly there were four men with guns, all around me." The guns weren't drawn, but there were guns, in an airport. They "suggested" that I take a walk with them.
It seems that I must have entered the "country" (the EU, it turned out, which is no country) illegally, because, according to the remarkably self-important Dutch police, "No country ever allows anyone without stamping their passports." (This is not only mistaken, but absurd. Nobody stamps passports...
The comments here claim that it's never a problem. Of course, they are wrong, but it was a problem for me!)
I was ushered into a room to talk to a man who did NOT have a gun, and (thank goodness) was endowed both with excellent English and wisdom.
I said that it was hardly my fault that France doesn't check passports, and that Czech Republic doesn't stamp them. There is no way I could have gotten a stamp in Paris, which is where he claimed I should have been checked, because they didn't even operate a passport control station inside the international transit area.
The gentleman smiled ruefully, and said, "That's quite true. And yet that is also what someone would say if they really were in the EU illegally, now, isn't it? If we simply believed people about when they entered and exited, the whole process could be done on the honor system. We have to try to enforce the law."
I had to admit this was actually true, from his perspective. And of course he had no way of knowing if I was telling the truth, because there was no stamp.
He asked if I had my tickets still from the journey into the EU. Fortunately, I did. He looked at them, and said, "Now I doubt you just forged these, so you must be telling the truth." And did a carefully placed, handwritten "correction"entry stamp proving I had entered the EU.
And then added an equally careful exit stamp allowing me to leave.
I have to ask: while it's true that could not have forged tickets RIGHT THEN, it would be easy to forge tickets before the fact. He didn't check the bar code, didn't make a copy, didn't do anything to verify that the tickets were legit.
Does this happen often? Thoughts?