By the time Ryan and I touched down in Amsterdam, I think we were both ready to leave the Eastern Bloc. About three-fourths of the way into the trip, I already found myself shamelessly hankering for a bar that served french fries instead of ten kinds of soggy salad swimming in mayonnaise, as well as a proper stand-up shower and cushy white toilet paper. But most of all, I was excited about returning to a world where everyday service industry encounters wouldn't make me feel like I'd reached out my hand to gently pet a dog and received a gory flesh wound for my troubles. After the unsmilingly grim Eastern Europeans, the Dutch were like blue-eyed, apple-cheeked cherubs, lilting away in their peculiarly cheerful Germanic English and punctuating every other phrase with an upbeat "yep." Maybe that's why I was so blithely optimistic in the passport control line, assuring myself that there'd be no problem with leaving the airport to spend our night-long layover in a hotel. I'd done it before with my family, and I figured this time could only be more clear-cut, seeing as I would be in the company of my American citizen husband. Tired but chipper, Ryan and I scooted ourselves up to the counter and presented our passports to the smiling young Dutchman. The smiling young Dutchman took our papers, thumbed through Ryan's American passport like a flip-book, and handed it back with the all-clear stamp. Then he picked up my passport, and his smile faded a little. He looked up at me with a slight frisson of pain clouding his aquamarine eyes. "You cannot go out without a visa," he said. Then he flagged down another smiling female coworker, who took us to a small room, let us wait for five minutes, then smilingly repeated the same short, sweet sentence. Non-EU or non-North American passport, no dice.
I'd like to blame exhaustion and the stress of traveling for the waterworks of hot, childish tears that tumbled out of me as I dug around futilely in my purse for my discharged cell phone and the number of the hotel I'd reserved, so that I could call and cancel in time to get our money back. Ryan, trying his best to comfort me, took control and called from a pay phone, then laughed and joked as we wandered the airport in search of somewhere to crash. Tucked away on the upper tier of our terminal was a so-called "comfort seat" section, full of backward-reclined chairs populated by a veritable internat of stranded undesirables. Two Southeast Asian women were curled up in impossible-to-sleep positions under complimentary Northwest Airlines blankets, eyes shut tight and limbs immobile. A gaggle of Georgians ignored the sleepers and talked boisterously, made friends with an itinerant Singaporean, then set up a laptop to stream a YouTube video of some loud, whacky Eastern European variety show. A Muslim woman and her husband took turns nursing their sick child, one wheeling him around in a stroller around the "comfort chairs," while the other got onto a small rug laid out toward Mecca and silently prayed to Allah. This was where we spent the night, bathed in the glow of the overhead florescent lights and a steady stream of never-ending muzak.
Instead of all the Western European comforts I'd been dreaming of, I ended up eating potato chips for dinner, brushing my teeth in an airport bathroom sink, and getting no more than an hour or two of stiff, aching sleep. When two of the Georgians came into the bathroom as I was washing up and asked if I minded that they smoke, I wanted to tell them I didn't mind if they set the whole damn airport ablaze. I began to understand the grim visages of my compatriots in Ukraine, the way they shifted their gaze downward and refused pleasantries. Even if they'd never been out of the country, I'm sure they're well aware of the label placed upon them by the rest of Europe: poor, backward, helpless, and ready to flood the borders at the drop of a hat. Unlike spoiled little me with my flashy green card and effortless Americanness, they're made to feel that kind of subtle humiliation every single day. Doesn't matter if you're a checkout girl in a Kiev supermarket or a PhD student at Harvard. It's a simple Pavlovian response: if you're treated like a dog, your canines start to itch for some soft, coddled flesh.
