Monday, March 10, 2014

Look back and smile of perils past/ Paris 2




Somehow our devils are never quite what
we expect when we meet them face to face.
~Nelson DeMille



And so I went to the airport second day....looking ahead to my arrival in London, be reunited with my husband, I missed him so much by now, my patience was long gone. And I prayed to God that my delivery pains did not come. Not yet. Just a bit longer. Please my baby, just wait a little bit longer till I m there with your father. 
Back in those times, the airport was very much divided in separate sections: Schengen area departures, non - Schengen area departures. If you were traveling to another Schengen country (and UK was not one of them), you did not need to go though the police and immigration formalities. You could just go directly to your boarding gate. But if you were, as I was, and UK was a country out of the Schengen area, you needed to undergo the police and immigration formalities before boarding your flight. So praying and with a heart jumping out of my chest, I approached the check in officer and gave him my Belgian passport. Bonjour madam, he said to me. I said bonjour back.....it took him what felt like half an hour to check my passport. He consulted his colleagues, talked quickly I did not need to have any French to understand something is definitely wrong. He talked to me asking me if I m Belgian and I know I panicked, tried to keep my French articulate, with no accent but I also knew that ship has sailed. It did not matter by this point how good my French was. The passport wasn't good enough. And I blushed and my French got more incoherent by the minute. After being on the phone for a few minutes, I was asked by the officer to follow him. He was nice with me and I could not help wondering why am I so scared. I started crying. We got by minibus to the Emigration Office of the airport. I was placed in a room with a very serious looking man behind a messy desk. He was talking at the phone and took his time before stopping to talk to me. He opened a passport and looked at it. It was my Belgian passport.  He saw I ve been crying and he fixed his eyes on me for a while. Than he asked me where did I get this passport, cause he knows its not mine, and he s expecting me to tell him the truth. I decided than and there to tell him the truth. I told him some person that I never met myself, from Romania gave me this passport for a large sum of money. I told him I want to get to London where my husband is. He said I cannot because I do not have a traveling document. I told him I m well over 8 months pregnant, due to have my baby any day now. He did not like that, he seemed worried, for me or because of me. He made a phone-call and minutes later a woman entered the room. She asked me to follow her. I did 
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