The Form

On Halloween we spent a comfortable two hours aboard a Spanish Vueling (VWELL-ing) flight from Rome's Fiumicino airport to Prague's Vaclav Havel. This is one of the best operated airlines you've probably never heard of.  I sure hadn't heard of it. In fact, now I'm making a point of reminding myself how to pronounce its name (VWELL-ing! VWELL-ing!) so that I can tell people about it.

Except for one thing.

Halfway through, flight attendants strode down the aisle bearing a sheaf of forms to be filled out, and they were handing one out to everyone. The instructions came over the loudspeaker in no tongue I could understand, but I saw no reason for any form to be filled out. We were solidly within EU territory and, as Bill has drilled me more than once, "We have NOTHING to declare! NOTHING!"

We read the English side of the form, entitled "Disembarkation Form." As we interpreted things, focusing in particular on question 6, the form's goal was to stamp out ebola by determining whether one had been in Liberia, Sierra Leone, or Guinea recently. We hadn't, so we figured there was no need for us to fill out the form. I stuffed it in the seatback in front of me and folded my arms.

Meanwhile, the two stolid Czech guys sitting next to me, good citizens as Czechs tend to be, immediately bent to the task of filling out their forms, glancing at me sideways as I put mine away, untouched.

"Excuse me," I piped up. "Do you speak English?"

One of them did.

"Um, I don't think you need to fill out the form.  See?  It says here only if you've been in Africa.  You haven't been in Africa, have you?"

They grinned and continued filling out their forms.

I went on, "I'm not filling mine out. We might be worse off for filling it out and drawing attention to ourselves!"  I felt like Lech Walesa. Wrong country, but you know. Freedom and all.

Was I being a pushy American woman? No--this was the American way of perceiving the absurdity in a situation that these placid Czechs simply accepted. While waiting for the train in Orvieto the previous morning, we had met two Australians who gave us a refreshing new view of ourselves as a nationality.

"More than anything, Americans are funny, aren't they?" they'd said. We were thrilled. How delightful not to be painted with the "loud, obnoxious" brush. And this, even after I had applied the "exiled Limey prisoner" brush to them. We at once began regaling them with jokes such as we've never told and left them rolling on the train platform.

But the Czech gentlemen were not amused and obediently completed their forms.

When I saw free-thinking Italians, up and down the aisle, also filling out their forms, I read more closely and saw that the form was intended, not just to see if we'd been in Africa, but also to track our whereabouts once we reached our destination. They were leaving nothing to chance here.

In a few small additional acts of defiance, I provided, not my passport number, but my phone number; used the American order in my date abbreviations (10/31/14 instead of the European 31/10/14); and marked a large black X through question 6.