WilcoRoger

Where was this? Sounds even worse then when a Scottish drugstore's cashier refused to accept my EU-id - the fact the UK Border Agency was fine with it when entering the country didn't move her. Showing ANOTHER credit card in my name did the trick. But this was a private business, your experience is with law enforcement!

WilcoRoger

To the original question - I learned the hard way to carry my travel document at all times. I was suddenly hospitalized then med-evac'd from Moscow some 20 yrs ago. Passport was in my hotel room and it was next to impossible to have the hotel admit anyone into my room to collect my pp and belongings.

Dragonbelle

When you put it that way, by comparison the average traveler is more likely to need emergency medical treatment than having the local police ask for ID.

Whatever method one uses to carry travel documents, make sure it's moistureproof. Some travelers went hiking in very hot weather, with their passports in neck wallets. They unintentionally ruined the pp's when the wallets got soaked in sweat.

A year ago in London, a tourist boat caught fire and everyone had to jump overboard into the Thames River. The company was London Duck Tours, which conducts land/water tours using amphibious vehicles. I was there on vacation when this happened, and brought the newspaper story home as a souvenir.

WR, may I ask how you finally got your pp and things from the hotel?

GUWonder

Maybe the Finns should thank the Russians for sparing the Finnish from an uninterrupted Swedish bureaucracy.

Does that jingle answer the question? It should.

Give it to government to have a history of bureaucratic procedures which don't all align in a sensible way. I have other examples too -- law enforcement ones too -- in other jurisdictions, but I'm just answering the question in relation to my post.

Maybe comedian Amy Poehler's brother should get this into his show called "Welcome to Sweden" -- as reality is so amusing in so many ways.

WilcoRoger

My memories are somewhat hazy, but in the end it was my local driver who got admission after a number of phone calls from the hospital staff.

This was a time and place when the room keys were still real keys with weights dangling on them and had to be left at the reception. Today you'd just give the key card to someone you trust.

WilcoRoger

How about the time when the plastic ID card got damaged, so I went to the local police to have it replaced - and I had no way to identify myself, as the card was "invalid" due to the damage, my d/l was from another country and my pp was 2000 km away... Talk about Kafkaesque. (This was not in Finland, for the sake of clarity)

GUWonder

Fraudulently-used real Syrian passports have a rather high value in some underground markets. And when I mean a rather high value in this context, I am thinking about a higher value than US passports in various underground markets in European and Med-surrounding countries.

deniah

right now Syrian passports (real or fake) are in high demand because of (somewhat) acceptance of asylum seekers into Germany and other EU countries

GUWonder

Yes, which in large part gets back to the point that the blackmarkets in real passports don't always value stolen US passports all that highly. Stolen Syrian passports have become quite the hot commodity with the blackmarket consumers and dealers paying higher prices for them and even ordering stolen Syrian passports.

Where there is demand, there is a market to be supplied by suppliers. Where the market is forced underground and/or a blackmarket arises to make up for governmental failings to satisfy human needs, there organized criminal gangs, local and otherwise, gain.