When you enter a country your right to privacy and freedom of movement gives way to a state’s need to control who gets in. The state wants to match the person presenting at the border to a database record. The way you used to do this was to present a special hard-to-fake piece of paper (a passport) that had both the database index (name and passport number) and a photo of the person. So many spy stories hinge on altering a passport, and thus the match between person, photo and database index.
Jason Bourne though is exploiting a weak link - why is the person at the border presenting the thing that links the person and database? So the US is moving in pieces to not really needing a passport, first for “Global Entry” citizens returning to the US. The government collects extra info, like finger prints and facial scans, and then at the border they just do a facial match and wave you through.
The EU is doing Global Entry one better. They are collecting identifying info for all people crossing into the EU.
Which is just a long winded way of saying that entering the EU right now is a pain. It took us an extra hour while they collected fingerprints and did facial scans. Do not book a tight connection after landing in your first EU country. You have been warned.
How long until passports are obsolete? 🤔
After landing in Copenhagen we took the train across the Öresundsbron to Malmö in Sweden. Evidently the Danish Copenhagen area and the Swedish Malmö region function more and more as one large metro. Sweden is a little cheaper to live in, so many live in Sweden and commute to Copenhagen acrross the Øresund bridge.
Our destination was old university town of Lund, Sweden, where our niece Evalena goes to school.