A Letter from America

I had typed out a vastly amusing entry about the journey here, and as usual I selected it all and pressed Ctrl-C to copy it in to memory before hitting Update in case Livejournal ate it. In that moment I had forgotten the fact that I was on a Mac, though, where Ctrl-C seems to not be "Put this in memory" but instead "Instantly delete everything I've selected and make it unrecoverable".

I shall therefore start again, seeing what I can remember. Like I forgot to tell everyone previously, I am now in America staying with Whitney, which is rather a change for me as it's the first time in my life that I've been outside Europe. Yesterday I travelled over 10,000km - ten million metres! - and took a flight that took eleven hours in two hours, arriving almost before I started, which would have been a bit Doctor Who. It's the story of that journey that's about to unfold here.

Right - why do they always ask you if you packed your own case in airports? "No, now that you mention it I let a dodgy Iraqi man check it over for me while I went and had a coffee." The flight out of Aberdeen was delayed, which means that I have still never been on a flight out of Scotland that was on time. At least breakfast was served while in the air, by someone who had the most comical French accent since Antoine de Caunes. I asked for orange juice, which resulted in me being handed a tray of muffins, but they were appreciated nonetheless.

On getting to Paris late, I was professionally instructed to "leg it" to catch my next flight. Honestly, what's the quote mark key doing there, why can't they have it somewhere sensible? Oh, sorry - anyway, I was most confused by the layout of Charles De Gaulle airport and eventually found myself in a narrow stone staircase that led to gate 87. Once I got there I was searched thoroughly, and asked to remove my jacket, bag and shoes. Once the search had been completed the pilot arrived and asked to take a photo of my shoes, which rather worried me as I thought they must have found something incriminating in them, like the DDR homing device. It turned out, though, that he was just annoyed that they had made me take my stuff off in the corridor, without a table or anything.

Even that early alliance with the pilot wasn't enough to make the flight enjoyable, though, as it lasted eleven hours. Actually I wasn't sure how long it was because I was setting my watch back and forward throughout, trying to decide whether to think of time as Pacific or GMT. We were served food twice, but the airline achieved what I thought was impossible and provided worse food than I'm used to in Andrew Melville. There were two films, Two Brothers and Starsky and Hutch, but I didn't pay much attention to them because I spent most of the flight trying to puzzle out the two forms that I'd been given.

The first of these, the one to get through customs, was unhelpfully in French. Filling out that was quite like doing lab reports - no one really knows what they should put on it, so the idea is to think about what you have and to just put something down that sounds convincing enough. I think I did that fairly well, using the skills that I'd acquired in muddling my way through essays. The second one, the green visa-waiver form, was more difficult because they give the impression that if you so much as misspell the name of the place you're going to then you'll be hung, drawn, quartered and your bits deported back to where you came from. In reality, they were a lot more lenient and even let me off without knowing the address that I was going to.

And that address is where I'm sitting now. I'll update again with my impressions of America later, as all I've really done so far are eat and sleep - quite a normal summer holiday, really.