My crime was that I was 24, and an idiot. I hadn’t thought through the logistical challenges of travel for someone with a passport that meant it really mattered when you didn’t think through the logistical challenges of travel. It was the summer of 2009 and my sister and I had both been living abroad; she had been studying in the Netherlands, and I had been working in Ukraine.
When it was time to leave, we both flew back through Munich, where my sister hopped on her connecting flight to Amsterdam, and I would pop over to Frankfurt to make my international connection to Johannesburg. This has taken me a whole paragraph to explain, in English, without overwhelming panic and a depleted bank account hanging over me. You can imagine how long it took me to fully grasp the problem from the customs guard, who spoke to me almost entirely in German.