My very first visit to the UK, specifically Scotland was kind of… bumpy. “Sir, you need a visa in order to enter the UK”! Oooops!! Such a small detail just happened to slip my mind as I was busy deciding what lenses should I bring with me. Now I even wonder how I managed to get into the right plane to the right country. So I literally landed into detention, or how they formulated it nicely: a soft arrest. For about 5 hours. They searched very thoroughly my belongings and took it away, they checked myself even more thoroughly, I had to take off my socks for Christ’s sake. They took my fingerprints, they even took an ugly picture of me. Man, my very first mugshot: I wasn’t exactly sure if I should be proud or ashamed. I was interrogated three times, getting to answer the same questions in different chronological order. But if that wasn’t confusing enough: the weird police guy who was asking the questions had a very strong Scottish accent, which I barely could understand. So after a couple of my “Sorry again, what was the question? Was that a question?” they got a British (good looking) woman who then translated for me. From english to english. Inevitable I thought of Bill Murray from Lost in Translation – the good looking British woman asked me why I am laughing actually. She understood. And laughed, too. After all of this exciting stuff they locked me in a room without windows but with a TV which didn’t work, bunches of animal pictures on the walls, and a couple of books on the shelf, most of them in Arabic language, which I found very intriguing. I mean the animals pictures. I felt like a Jason Bourne, or at least as a sort of a high level immigrant. Maybe even a weapon dealer. Be that as it may, after an hour maybe they got me to talk to the manager. He said they must deport me back right away because there is no way to get a visa here, especially not that fast. I would have to take a plane tomorrow morning and stay in the detention until then. O dear – my first impressions regarding such an allegedly beautiful country like Scotland would be a windowless room with pictures of animals on the walls? Not to mention a not working TV?! No way. So I unpacked all of my rhetoric capabilities which I learned during my study of philosophy and literature and tried to explain to the highly dutiful manager why this would by almost a world crime, or at least a great crime against individual rights in the highest possible moral sense one can only imagine, also outside of the UK. The manager probably didn’t understand a word, me neither, but it got results: they bought me a nice lunch, let me for two days into the country, paid my flight back with Lufthansa, and even escorted me at the airport to the airplane. I felt like a celebrity. They even helped me by carrying my heavy bag of lenses (at the end I brought almost all of them). So, admittedly two days is not much time to visit Scotland and make nice photos and videos but in the right company it becomes only a challenging task. Many thanks to Jerry who drove us around and Jenny who showed us the most beautiful sights of Scotland. Next year I’ll get that visa, that’s for sure. So by all means enjoy the beautiful landscapes of Scotland.
