A closer look
Entering the European Schengen area allows you to seamlessly travel across twenty-nine different countries without ever showing your passport to a border guard, which is incredibly convenient right until you need to prove how long you have been there. Because there are no physical stamps or digital records tracking your movement between these specific nations, naive backpackers often accidentally overstay their legal ninety-day limit and end up getting aggressively detained at the airport when they finally try to fly home. It is a brilliant bureaucratic paradox where the authorities make it incredibly easy to wander aimlessly across borders but will absolutely penalize you for not keeping a meticulous personal diary of your coordinates. You get all the freedom of a borderless utopia combined with the crushing anxiety of an impending immigration violation
