What to do if you lose your passport!
What is the #1 rule when traveling abroad?
DON'T.LOSE.YOUR.PASSPORT.
And while I am a forgetful person, I had pride in knowing that I held on to that baby for 8 years.
Until my trip to Poland.
(Now, I feel like I should put a small disclaimer. I've never actually "lost" my passport, in fact, I knew where it was....it just wasn't with me).
So anyway, I had a fantastic trip to Poland. It was beautiful and historic. The people were so friendly and the food was AMAZING. The trip was perfect except for this incident.
I decided to take one of those cheap budget flights (WizzAir) roundtrip from Turku, Finland to Gdansk. It cost 20 euros roundtrip, and why not?
So I arrived in Turku after my trip, a friend picked me up and then we headed back to Helsinki. I got home, began to unpack and realized that my passport wasn't in my carry-on. My passport wasn't in my purse.
My passport wasn't in Helsinki.
(Cue dramatic crying)
I began to freak out and collapsed into an emotional wreck. I was living in a foreign country with no passport, wasn't sure how much money or how long it would take to get a new one, and had a trip to Germany coming up in 1.5 months.
My boyfriend called the airline company, because I was useless and dramatic at this point, and (drumroll....) they had found it on the plane!
BUT
They had already flown the plane back to Poland and mailed it to the US Embassy in Warsaw. I thought that it was okay though. At least it wasn't stolen, and I could get it back with all of my proudly-collected stamps.
We contacted the embassy, who then told us that there was no way for them to mail it to Helsinki's US Embassy because they couldn't mail official documents out of the country. My only options were to come to Poland to get it (although how could I without a passport...?), or report it as lost.
Well, eventually I managed to contact the Finnish US Embassy and they sorted it out with the Polish one.
But there was still one problem:
My trip to Germany was coming up and I only had 5 weeks to get my passport. I had planned this trip for awhile. Already bought the plane tickets, already made sleeping arrangements and now I just had to wait to see if fate would get me my passport in time.
I waited, and waited. Counted down the days until my trip.
Flash forward to the day before my trip. I checked my e-mail and...
"Your passport has arrived, please come and pick it up".
(Cue Hallelujah chorus)
Needless to say, my passport is now permanently attached to me whenever I go on trips abroad.
tl;dr Left my passport on the plane. Played phone tag with the embassies in two different countries. Got it back in the nick of time; a day before another big trip.
BUT some people are so lucky. Some people truly lose their passports to never see them again. It can be scary, especially when you are in a foreign country.
So what should you do then?
