“How Dare You Try to Shore up Our Faltering Economies?”

The wife and I won’t be going to Europe any time soon.

As noted in many earlier posts, the Europeans do not like it when Africans try to visit. Admittedly, Africans have a bad history as tourists, because people from West Africa tend to stay in Europe hiding from the law until they die, but Europeans respond to the threat in pretty stupid ways. Instead of looking at each case individually, they accept applications, throw them in the trash as soon as the applicants leave their offices, wait a few days or weeks while only pretending to look at the applications, and then tell the applicants they were rejected for this or that unfounded reason.

How do I know this? Funny you should ask.

My wife has made several applications for visas for the Schengen Area, which covers most of the EU. Every application was rejected. This includes the visa the lying Italians assured her we would get if she paid for tickets in advance.

Every single time she applied, they took her fingerprints as part of the pretend-examination farce.

Schengen countries are required by law to hold onto all biometric information supplied by visa applicants for 59 months, regardless of whether the applications are accepted or rejected. As noted above, she was forced to supply fingerprints at least 5 times. This can’t happen if the applications are actually entered into the system, to which all Schengen countries are hooked up.

They didn’t enter her biometric information in their system, so it was definitely discarded, so they didn’t actually examine her applications. But they pretended to. Italy, Sweden, Germany, Czechia, Austria…they all lied.

If they lied to my wife, they lie to just about everyone. They make exceptions for celebrities, politicians, some scholars who are invited, and probably some very rich people. Everyone else presumably gets the fraudulent process, and all the countries collect fees for doing nothing and lying to people, most of whom are of modest means.

All of her rejected efforts were filed while she lived in Africa, before she had a green card, so we figured things would get easier once she got here. Turns out there are still problems. It may be that the Schengen countries are more likely to accept permanent residents. I don’t know. Even if a green card helps, these people do such a bad job of providing information, it’s still very hard to get an application filed.

We decided to try applying to Greece, which has an consulate less than a light year away, unlike the other European countries a person might actually want to visit (i.e. not Latvia, Estonia, Albania…). It was important to us to use a consulate that was not far off, because they seriously require people to show up for interviews. They haven’t heard of Zoom.

The Greeks have a website full of information which, if relied on by applicants, is sure to get their applications rejected. If you email them with questions, they tell you nothing. We did get a call from some nice lady who worked there, and that was wonderful, but it was a one-time thing, and it was not enough.

They require a bunch of things. Travel medical insurance in excess of $30,000. Flight and hotel information. The original passport. A passport photo. Proof of financial ability to cover the trip. Three bank statements. An itinerary.

Our application was in trouble from the time we left the house, because my wife failed to check and make sure she brought her passport. That’s on us. Her, I mean. I could not believe it. But we had no chance anyway, because they required things the website did not mention.

I did offer to bring the passport the following morning, which was a reasonable offer they should have taken.

They wanted proof of my income, in the form of W-2’s. I don’t have a job, thankyouJesusthankyouJesusthankyouJesus. Okay, they wanted proof I received Social Security. I’m not that old yet. Okay, they wanted my last three tax returns. This was not on their site. They just dropped it on us when we got there. Of course, I just pulled two returns out of one ear and the remaining one out of a top hat I had brought with me. Yeah.

I actually had to ask them whether they needed entire returns. They were not going to tell me. I didn’t want to bring in a stack of papers. Oh, no, they said. Just the first two pages. It’s beyond belief I had to ask.

They also said assets don’t matter. So if you put 10 billion dollars in your travel checking account, it doesn’t prove you can pay for a trip to Greece and back. But if you earn $2000 per month at Walmart, you’re clearly wealthy enough to travel.

They want bank statements, but they say they don’t help. What are they for?

I’m not going to tell the world what I have, but I can show a consulate I have way more in terms of liquid assets than anyone would need to finance three weeks in the second world. If I didn’t, I could not be paying for foreign trips.

Does not matter.

Incidentally, this means you can’t go to Europe during a given year until you file your taxes. If you file an extension, you can’t get a visa until the return is filed. If you think you’re going to go to Europe, make sure you file before you apply, or get an appointment before April 15.

The amazing thing about all this is that you can put whatever you want on a tax return and give it to the consulate. You can take Turbotax and create a bogus return in an hour. Creating fake bank and brokerage statements is way harder.

I doubt you can get in trouble here in the US for falsifying an application for a foreign visa. The US doesn’t care about other countries’ immigration laws, and I don’t think the elements of criminal fraud would be satisfied due to the lack of monetary damages. Also, tax returns are confidential, so foreigners should be unable to verify their contents. I should claim to be a famous rapper and submit returns saying I made half a billion every year.

Floyd Mayweather supposedly took a $27 million check from a fight and put it in his checking account. Supposedly, he does not invest, so he has no regular income. If he were a green card holder from Kenya, he could never go to Europe. But if he were a green card holder from Kenya with $5000 in his checking account and a job managing a Papa John’s, he would have a shot.

Regarding our air travel plans, they said I could not just show up with something I had written, to prove we had flights. That was confusing, because I had supplied them with printouts from Orbitz, proving we had paid in advance for flights to and from Europe. These tickets cost something like a grand more than nonrefundable tickets, but I knew what I was up against when I bought them, so I spent the extra money.

Before the process started, they warned us not to actually buy tickets in advance. They said they just needed reservations. That mystified me, because reservations are things that have not existed for maybe 40 years. You either buy a ticket, or you have nothing.

In the past, other Schengeners have accepted “dummy tickets,” which are worthless tickets fabricated by travel agents. I thought actual tickets would be better than dummy tickets, which are clearly fraudulent by their very nature.

I paid for our hotels and rental units in advance, too. I thought that would impress them. Paid for, not just reserved.

I could not understand the consulate lady’s objections, so I kept questioning her in hopes of doing things right the next time. Finally, she gave me an explanation I understood, and which could possibly be correct, although I’ll bet it’s not.

She said the problem was with our INTERNAL flights. I had not booked flights between countries in Europe, thinking that PAID hotel bills would make it pretty clear we would be in various places at certain times. She said they needed to see the flights in order to show how long we would be in each country.

When she said I had just written down whatever I wanted, she was referring to the itinerary I drafted. Her objection made no sense at all. Our paid flights were documented by Orbitz receipts, and in the itinerary, I made no claims at all. I said we hadn’t chosen flights yet, assuming it was obvious we did not intend to walk across Europe in a couple of hours.

You can see how crazy the concern about internal flights is. If I have a hotel room booked in Greece on the morning of the 23rd, and I have another hotel room booked in Germany on the night of the 23rd, obviously, I will be in Greece in the morning and Germany in the evening, because I don’t want to lose hundreds and hundreds of dollars. Obvious, obvious, obvious. Whether I choose to use a train, a plane, a hot air balloon, or a camel to make the move doesn’t matter.

Well, it mattered to her.

A hotel booking is much stronger than a plane ticket. I can buy a ticket from Athens to Zurich any time I want. They’re abundant. I can cancel. I can rebook. No problem. Hotels don’t work like that. The supply of good hotels dries up fast, so once you get one you like, you do whatever you can to hold onto your booking. You are married to it. But try and tell the Europeans–the professionals who evaluate visa applications for a living–that.

I bought us medical insurance from American Express. I thought this company’s reputation was unimpeachable. The consulate told us it was no good because it did not expressly say “valid throughout the Schengen Area” on the documentation I gave them.

That blew my mind. How many visas has Greece processed? Millions. And they want tourist money, because their economy can’t survive without it. They should know a lot by now. We are not the first people who have used American Express. It should be very, very obvious that if American Express provides TRAVEL insurance to an AMERICAN and his PERMANENT RESIDENT wife, it covers them while they TRAVEL. Where do most Americans go when they travel overseas? EUROPE. They should know this by now.

I get it; they’re not Americans. But they live and work here, they know what American Express is, and as experienced consulate workers, they ought to know what American Express travel insurance is. If not, they should let you use your phone to print out additional information at the consulate instead of sending you home to try again in 6 months, by which time you will have given up or gone somewhere much nicer than Greece.

If I had bought bogus insurance through a fringe company like Heymondo, it would have cost much less, the documents would have assured that it covered us everywhere in Europe, and if we had ever presented a claim, it would have been denied, because Heymondo doesn’t pay claims. But Greece would have taken it. Other countries have. Worthless insurance costing $11 would have worked, but $41 insurance from the most respected travel company in the history of the universe was presumed ineffective.

I should not have to struggle to get a visa for my wife. We are well off. We have clean records. She has a green card. We live on a wonderful property in a wonderful county, so we don’t want to live in a depressing apartment in Athens or Rome. We have been to 6 foreign countries, and we returned home on time in every case. We did our best to follow the rules, and I’m a lawyer. If I can’t get it right, what chance do most people have?

We brought information they didn’t ask for on the website. I thought I was displaying exemplary caution. Our international driving permits. My passport. My driver’s license. My wife’s Zambian ID card and driver’s license. Our Global Entry cards.

When they saw my wife’s superfluous stuff, they told us they didn’t want it. They seemed to think we brought it because we were stupid or didn’t understand English, but we were just trying to be prepared. Then they started asking me for things they didn’t ask for in advance!

The people at the consulate really tried to be helpful, as far as I could tell. But their website is horrible, and they didn’t explain things well in person, either. I’m still not positive we could get to Greece, or even get an application accepted, this year if we decided to try again.

I have canceled all our tickets and reservations. Greece can kiss thousands and thousands of my dollars goodbye, during a relatively slow time when they could use the money. I wanted to give it to them. I wanted to see Greece again. I looked forward to the people. I remember the Greeks as very pleasant, with the exception of one creepy guy who used a braless girl in a tight dress to try to get me to go to his bar.

Tough self-made luck for Greece. I can’t go through this again for a second-tier destination. They will probably find other reasons to reject us, because they can’t get it together well enough to help us give them what they want.

If I’m going to suffer like this and risk losing months of travel opportunities every time, I’m going to shoot for the best destination there is: Switzerland. Forget Greece, which is good, but not great. Forget all the other nice-but-not-that-nice Schengens. Forget Sweden. Forget Belgium. Forget Poland and Hungary. Forget England, which I have never wanted to visit anyway. I don’t have time to waste. We’ll drive six hours to Atlanta, where the nearest consulate is, we’ll stay in a hotel, and we’ll file a visa application there. Then we’ll visit Tennessee, because my wife wants to see it.

I really like the Greeks, but let’s face it: the Swiss are on another level. If there is a way to do things right, the Swiss will do it. They make Germans look like Mexicans.

Ouch. That was harsh of me.

They won’t tell us to buy tickets and then turn out to be lying, like the Italians. They won’t give us incomplete and incomprehensible information, like the Greeks. Their explanations will be easily comprehended by two intelligent people with 4 college degrees, including two law degrees.

They’ll probably even file my wife’s application instead of throwing it out immediately.

I told my wife I would never have to divorce her. If I get tired of her, all I have to do is drive to the airport and fly to Europe, Japan, Israel, or just about anywhere else people actually want to go, without a visa. There is no way she’ll be able to follow me, ever. I’ll be able to take the kids. They’ll be Americans.

Applying for visas for Africans is like asking strangers if you can mail them your poop.

Maybe we can make it in the fall, by which time the wife could be pregnant and the size of a house. Great for hiking in the alps.

Oh, well. There’s always Yellowstone Park.

In case anyone else wants to try getting a Greek visa, let me point out a hazard. People on the web say they give you an approval or disapproval at the appointment. Not true, at least for my wife (African…hmm). They told us they needed two weeks.

We knew it could take 15 days for the visa to arrive, but we thought we would know the answer right away. Not even close to true. If we had scheduled the trip later, just when the hordes of drunken, spoiled, rude Chinese and American tourists will start to pour in, we would have had a chance, but these days, you don’t go to Europe in the summer unless you have no choice. Europe is overrun in the summer.

If I could stand crowds, we’d live within two hundred yards of our neighbors.

When you deal with a Schengen country, you have to have lots of stuff booked in advance. Here is something consulates do not understand: hotels give you a certain amount of time to cancel each booking and get a refund, and unless you plan a trip a very (unrealistically) long time in advance, the time to cancel will pass not long after your visa appointment.

If you have a problem at the appointment, you may not get your visa before you have to pay for your bookings or cancel them. If you cancel them, the Schengeners will reject your application because you canceled. They’ll find out, because they pull weasel tricks like that. If you don’t cancel, you’re betting thousands of dollars on getting a positive outcome from known flakes, which no one but an imbecile would do.

They don’t care if you lose a million dollars. Means nothing to them. They will cancel you without warning, and they will not help you make it right in time to fix the problem.

The Greeks said they could put us on a waitlist for a canceled appointment, and there was some chance we could still make it. No way. We had cut it close already. It was nice of them to make the effort.

If I were to try to plan the same trip again, it would have to be for this fall. It would take me a week of staring at the computer. I would have to spend maybe $10,000 on bookings. I’d get an appointment in June or early July. Then they would say no by early- or mid-July, and I’d have to start over, meaning we couldn’t go to Europe until the following May, unless we wanted to freeze under skies the color of mud. I’d have to go through the miserable process of making sure all my money was refunded, and the hotels and airline would take their sweet time.

It just doesn’t work. Not for a place like Athens. I can risk it for Lucerne, though.

If you do what I’m doing, you get two chances per year. You can try to travel in late spring, or you can try to go in the fall. After you blow those chances, you are done. If you want to go in spring, realistically, you should ask for your appointment in November, and you will get an appointment in February. If you want to go in the fall, ask no later than May, and they will see you some time in July.

The Schengeners make things too hard.

Maybe it’s time to try Japan and Taiwan. Those are good possibilities. There is literally nowhere I want to go in this hemisphere, outside of the US. I don’t want to be bombarded with even more Spanish, see cultural and historical sights of near-zero merit, eat second-rate amoeba-laden food from peasant cuisines, drink water that gives me diarrhea and rectal bleeding, and have poor Indians try to sell me crude, tasteless blankets I wouldn’t use to cover vomit stains on the backseat of a ’74 Pinto.

My wife and I were a car ride away from Chichen Itza, and neither of us were willing to go. Not only was I unwilling to pay to go; I would have paid at least a hundred dollars for each of us to be excused from going.

If it were across the street, sure, but wasting a whole day to sweat in the jungle and see where savages cut children’s hearts out? No, thanks. I’ll see it on Youtube, or, more likely, I won’t. It ain’t Versailles, kids. Nothing beats Europe, and that includes what we have here in the US.

I think I’ll look into Taiwan and Japan tomorrow. Can’t hurt.