We were not trying to run or away from home or rather JAPA. We simply wanted a family vacation to Cyprus but made a huge blunder. We assumed that we could go using our American visas because it was accepted before but the rule had changed. You could only get in with Cypriot visas. What was meant to be a short stopover quietly turned into exclusion. We slept on airport benches for three days and survived on chicken nuggets cause the airport hotels would have made us broke in a place where google translate became our most used app. We were stranded by a system that did not recognize us as people, only as documents.