Originally Posted by
scottishpoet
If you left cdg then you would have had an exit stamp there. I see 2 cdg stamps in the photo, one arrival from 2019, one departure from 2023, hence the passport officers confusion.
Also looks like schengen exit from midi then an entry in london .The set up in midi will be the same as i mentioned for gare du nord, schengen border exit stamp, then a few meters later uk immigration but no stamp. The exit from st pancras is just the schengen border agents. No uk arrival passport check at st pancras as it was done at the departure station, no uk departure passport check, that is all done electronically. The midi exit stamp from 2023. I cant make out the date on the london entry, possibly 2023 as well.
Also note that you always get a F(RANCE) entry stamp when departing London by Eurostar even when you are going to Belgium or the Netherlands, but in the reverse direction you would get a B(ELGIUM) or NL stamp (unless the passport control in Amsterdam / Rotterdam was not operating at that time in which case it will also be B).
There is a UK passport check on departing St Pancras, but it is done by Eurostar staff.
There can be spot checks by UK agents on arrival at St Pancras too, but they won't stamp.
Thanks. It's fun to make sense of this after the fact since the question came up. The French agent was not confused by the 2019 stamp because the entry to Schengen stamp was on a different page and happened to be the first page he saw. That's when he asked. The rest got clumped oin these pages but the entry in 2023 was on its own special page; that was in Helsinki.
Yes, there was an exit and entry at midi. Correct. Both were 2023. In Paris, on departure, the officer just verified my entry when he happened to open to the Helsinki page, and I directed him to these pages and he didn't bat and eye and stamped it and wished me well!
Now I have a brand new passport which will have fewer stamps than ever. They are fun, but we surely are in a technological age that doesn't need them (and a geopolitical one that makes some of them have varying connotations too quickly, it seems).
Thanks for the insight from the experts here, as always!