Well I guess when I get my new passport I will change my name to Ben Dover. Everything went alright on my trip to Moscow, my wife found a nice apartment we could stay at within sight of victory park. She paid 600 for 9 days. I got a good price on a ticket through Lufthansa and saved 200 bucks. I even got to sleep well on the plane to Frankfurt. It was all good, until I ran across a goat of a woman in German passport control. It seems there was a part of page 7 of my passport torn out, not a big part, only about a quarter of the page. It has been that way for years. I have traveled to Russia, Belarus and the Ukraine with that torn page more than once. I have never had a problem anywhere with that pages existance. She said she could not let me pass because I had an improper passport. She explained that if the Russian customs rejected me the responsibility would lay on her shoulders and the German government and they would have to pay a 5000 dollar fine. The Lufthansa supervisor tried to talk to her and we even got the Aeroflot representative, she said the passport was good along with the VISA. She said if the Aeroflot supervisor was there she would consider it but he was apparently gone for the weekend. Another flight, a train? Around German customs? I would be dealing with the same thing. I gave up and cut my losses. Lufthansa was gracious enough to give me a free ticket back to Seattle the next day. I spent the night in the airport fuming. I spent NOTHING in that airport, not a penny. I also found out how bad the American dollar has become. A hotel room for a night would have been $250, and that was downtown in the redlight district. At the airport I didn't even ask. You hear horror stories but you never think they will happen to you. The only thing I did differently was go through Germany to get where I was going. I usually go through Warsaw. I will never step on German soil again if I can avoid it. My losses with this are going to be about $1000 but I have not done the math yet. Maybe this can be useful to someone here in the future. I'm going to go pound rocks for awhile.
I love the country and it's civilians...but German authorities are the worst!!! I had a similar problem with a company car that I was driving from Poland to Germany to take my wife to the airport in Berlin. Apparently, the ownership papers for the car had not been signed on the proper line and they would not allow us to pass into Germany. We ended up having to drive all the way back to Warsaw, have the Polish owner of the company sign the document on the proper line and return to the border. What a joke...
What is known in the UK as a jobsworth. Jobsworth - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia I bet you uttered the words..."Bloody Germans!"
I called the woman a "f**cking Nazi" to her face towards the end. Other than that I was angry but reasonably civil. Considering the jobsworth concept maybe since there is such high unemployment in Germany she just was not going to take a chance. I don't really care though, this was asanine. Lufthansa screwed me for the rest of the ticket so getting me back will get them nothing in my eyes. They came out ahead. One more reason to keep a very wide berth of that border.
