But if someone had told me this morning, round about 8.00 AM, Lisbon time, that I would be that I would be taking such relaxed advantage of the fanciness of this place, I would have said I doubted it. This morning, round about 8.00 AM, Lisbon time, I didn’t own a passport of my own and the prospects of getting my hands to one before the flight departed at round about noon, Lisbon time just as well, were certainly not great.
This trip started yesterday, as any good trip, before it started, when I realized that my good’old passport, other from not being in the place where I usually keep it, was no-where else to be found. This, I repeat, a few hours shy of taking off. I looked and looked, trust me, time and again, under every rock, in every dark corner, in the middle of every page, but it wasn’t there.
And so it was passportless that I decided to face the airport gateway to Brazil, a country one cannot enter passportless. And yet it all worked out in the end, as things tend to when the end draws ever near. The Portuguese Republic, in all its might, has created a modality of passport that can be made on the spot, in case you find yourself in a tight one. Of course, as with everything with my republic, it wasn’t going to allow me to give it due praise without a fight. Before getting this passport, one must go to the police station at the airport and claim that his good’old document is lost. A number of dumb questions will obviously garnish the whole experience, as a testament to your own dumbness in having lost the God damned thing. “Where did you lose it?”, they asked me.
- Uuurh, I don’t know?
- Well, but how did it happen?
- I guess I thought I knew where it was, but when I went to look for it I found out I didn’t know after all.
- Ok, but what’s your name again.
- I think it’s easier if you just copy it from the ID card I already gave you.
I answered everything calmly, pacified by the notion that I deserved that for not having been able to find my passport the very day before I was ever going to need it. And so I answered, I waited, I saw time passing by, and when the nice officer finally made it to the printer and handed me the piece of paper, I ran.
“No need to hurry”, I was told. The republic shone its brightest face at me again. I met with the officer of the border control, Ana Paula, the nicest person all day (needless to say my parents, and quite rightfully so, lost that title the very second they realized I lost my freaking passport. “What time is your flight, sonny?” Paula asked. “In just 2 hours”, I replied, hiding my nervousness behind my fakest smile. “Oh, there’s more than time”, and she was right. This passport takes 10 minutes to make. It is all hand-written and thinner than the usual one, because it is only meant to last 6 months and one is not expected to ask for the whole lot of strange visas in that period, especially when all you have is a hand-written passport.
It’s also of a different color. It is dark blue instead of the usual burgundy ones, a special color, for a special set of people. As if to say, “count your blessings, jackass! And thank God we won’t make you go around with a good'old «dummy» sign on your back.”
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