By Mihai Ungureanu
I was a rather unusual child.
Even as a baby, I seemed to operate on American time. I cried and screamed all night long, while during the day I slept peacefully, like a little angel.
My parents were desperate.
They tried everything they could think of, but nothing worked. Night after night, the same concert. No intermission, no vacation, and certainly no indication that the performance would end anytime soon.
Eventually, somehow, I grew older, and peace finally returned to the family.
The boy grew up. School, high school, military service.
And then, after the army, surprise!
The boy decided to get married.
But unlike most young newlyweds, I wasn't particularly concerned about the wedding itself.
I was thinking about what would happen afterward.
More precisely, counting the wedding gift money.
The Wedding Money and the Grand Plan
The wedding was over, morning arrived, and we started counting.
We counted the money once.
Twice.
About five times, just in case it might somehow multiply.
It didn't.
And after confirming that the amount remained stubbornly unchanged, the big question arose:
What should we do with the money?
The future in Romania was quite uncertain, and I had other plans for my life.
So I told my father:
"Dad, I want to go abroad."
Dad contacted some people he knew, and for 1,500 German marks, we managed to obtain a travel and business visa for France.
My brother had already left Romania. He had connections in France and had eventually made his way to Ireland, where I intended to join him.
That's where I planned to start a new life.
A simple plan, right?
France, then Ireland.
What could possibly go wrong?
Well, almost everything.
Paris and the Minus-One-Star Hotel
I landed at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris.
I waited about six hours before a friend of my brother finally came to pick me up.
He took me to a hotel.
But not just any hotel.
A minus-one-star hotel.
There, he put me in a room with three other Romanians.
Freshly arrived from Romania, I was bursting with curiosity.
"So, guys, what do you do here? How do you make a living?"
Two of them were brothers and, at least according to their documents, minors.
"We work! We all work!"
I thought I'd landed in good company.
Hardworking, resourceful people earning an honest living in the West.
But it wasn't until the following day that I discovered what they meant by "work."
That evening, they began returning one by one.
The first came back from the Eiffel Tower, so badly sunburned that he looked as though he'd spent the entire day at the beach.
He had been begging all day, and the sun had done its job.
One of the brothers returned with something to eat.
The other appeared carrying a brand-new sneaker.
Just one.
I looked at him and asked:
"Hey, buddy, where's the other one?"
"I'm going back to get it tomorrow!"
Aha!
Now I was beginning to understand how the local economy worked.
Man, what a life these guys had!
It was a kind of "work" I didn't understand and, frankly, couldn't imagine myself doing.
So I began calculating how much longer I could afford to stay among these "unskilled workers."
England, the Land of Hope
After a week, the little money I had brought with me was almost gone.
I had to do something.
With considerable effort, I convinced my three companions that life in France wasn't exactly paradise and that we should try our luck in England.
And that was that.
On the morning of our departure, four adventurers were ready to begin the journey of a lifetime.
Me.
The two "underage" brothers.
And the sunburned fellow from the Eiffel Tower.
Another friend of theirs joined us.
Not because he was coming along.
But because somebody had to close us inside.
Yes, you've guessed it.
We were going to travel illegally inside a canvas-covered truck trailer.
A truly spectacular means of transportation.
No seats.
No windows.
No bathroom.
And, of course, no tickets.
The trailer was packed almost to the ceiling with boxes. We struggled to climb inside and, after some effort, managed to reach the front.
There we settled in.
Now all we had to do was wait for the tractor unit to arrive and pull us toward the ferry.
After about three hours, we started moving.
And boy, did we move!
The driver was going as though he were competing in a rally, while we desperately tried to hold on to something.
Unfortunately, there wasn't much to hold on to.
After a while, complete silence.
No more engine noise.
No more road vibrations.
We were floating.
Four Romanians inside a gigantic box, somewhere at sea, carried by the waves toward our dream.
England!
It might as well have been written across our foreheads.
French Wine and the Improvised Bathroom
After a few hours, we made an extraordinary discovery.
Every box in the trailer was filled with French wine.
Well, if we were in France, we might as well enjoy a little local culture!
We had a clever pocketknife that allowed us to open the bottles.
And so the wine tasting began.
One bottle, one sip.
Another bottle, another sip.
We couldn't afford to get drunk. We still had to reach our destination in one piece.
So we limited ourselves to being professional wine tasters.
After a while, I dozed off.
I don't know how long I slept, but something woke me abruptly.
A horrible smell had invaded my nostrils.
The smell of human waste.
You understand.
That trailer was our bedroom.
And our kitchen.
And our bathroom.
Everything in one convenient space.
A truly multifunctional apartment.
Just without any of the comforts of an apartment.
Escaping the Trailer
Eventually, we arrived in southern England.
The truck took us to its destination.
Unfortunately, it wasn't ours.
We waited until everything became quiet, then cut through the canvas covering and began climbing down.
When I jumped, it seemed to take forever before my feet finally touched the ground.
Only then did I realize how high up we had been.
But we were in England!
Freedom seemed only a few steps away.
We decided to split into two groups.
Two of us on one side of the street, two on the other.
We didn't want to attract attention.
We had a map and a Romanian-English dictionary.
Armed with these two sophisticated navigation tools, we set off toward the nearest railway station.
Eventually, we made it.
Next destination: London.
I bought a train ticket.
My three companions didn't.
They were accustomed to other methods of transportation.
In France, as they had explained to me, their fines were paid by the church, and their false documents identifying them as minors helped them avoid deportation.
I still believed that buying an honest train ticket was a worthwhile investment.
London and an Unpleasant Surprise
We arrived in London.
From there, we planned to continue to Dublin.
We bought our tickets.
Everything seemed to be going according to plan.
Until...
We were suddenly pulled aside.
All four of us.
Searched.
And arrested.
In an instant, my Irish dream had turned into an English nightmare.
When I found myself locked up, I realized just how quickly a man's life can change.
Only a short time earlier, I had been a groom.
Now I was in jail.
From the wedding straight to prison!
They confiscated my shoelaces, my belt, and everything else I had with me.
Including my passport.
The following days were a nightmare.
Interrogation after interrogation.
First all together, then separately.
A Romanian interpreter arrived to translate our explanations.
And explain we did.
All sorts of nonsense.
The authorities desperately wanted to know how we had entered England.
We tried to avoid giving overly precise answers.
Eventually, the threats began.
If we didn't tell the truth, they said, we'd rot in there.
I was a newlywed.
I thought about my wife.
My home.
The life I had left behind.
And I was the first to give in.
Back to Bucharest
A few days later, I found myself at an airport.
I was told to board a plane and that my passport would be returned to me when I arrived at Otopeni Airport in Bucharest.
And that was how my English adventure ended.
With a ten-year ban on entering England.
And one very personal conclusion:
Why the hell did I have to get married?
If I hadn't gotten married, I wouldn't have had the wedding money.
Without the wedding money, I wouldn't have bought the visa.
Without the visa, I wouldn't have gone to France.
And without France, I wouldn't have ended up inside a truck trailer full of wine, floating toward England.
I'd have been perfectly fine.
Poorer, admittedly.
But without a ten-year ban.
What Happened to the Others?
A few years later, I learned what had happened to my three companions.
They had applied for political asylum in England.
The process had taken almost a year, during which, from what I heard, they had remained in detention.
Eventually, they made it to Ireland.
But their methods of "unskilled labor" didn't work quite as well there.
And before long, they ended up back where they had started, at what turned out to be their final destination.
Meanwhile, I had returned to Romania.
With my tail between my legs.
Deflated.
And with a bitter taste in my mouth.
But looking back, there was a bright side.
I was alive.
If we'd been discovered on the ferry, who knows what might have happened to us?
At the time, the danger seemed enormous.
For all I knew, we might have ended up as fish food.
What madness!
America Was Waiting for Me
I returned home to my brand-new wife.
And a year later, something completely unexpected happened.
I won the United States Diversity Visa Lottery.
This time, no truck trailers.
No cutting through canvas.
No secret French wine tastings.
And no prison.
My wife and I arrived in America together.
The place where, perhaps, I was supposed to end up all along.
Remember how this story began?
With a little boy who cried all night and slept all day, as though he were already living on American time.
Apparently, my destination had been written into my internal clock from the beginning.
I'd simply chosen a rather complicated route to get there.
My Honeymoon
Twenty-eight years have passed.
And sometimes I still ask myself:
Man, how stupid do you have to be to do something like that?
To voluntarily climb inside a truck trailer, cross the sea hidden among boxes, risk being discovered, and end up in jail?
And all of this shortly after getting married?
But you know something?
I've made peace with it.
In fact, I'm proud of myself!
I tried.
I took risks.
I made mistakes.
I survived.
And eventually, I got where I wanted to go.
Besides, when I really think about it, the wedding money wasn't entirely wasted.
During that week in France, I visited the Eiffel Tower, the Champs-Élysées, and plenty of other beautiful places.
So whenever my wife gives me a hard time about spending our wedding money on that crazy adventure, I have the perfect answer:
"Honey, I was on my honeymoon!"
The Owl Doesn't Forget. 🦉