Bruxelles > New York > San Francisco

We arrive in San Francisco half-dead and starving, as is a usual arrival state for us with our habit of buying extremely cheap budget flight tickets that mean travelling to Belgium or Germany at unholy hours before we even embark on our journey to sunnier climes.

We had to 'go through immigration' at the first port of call in the US, which was New York JFK. This involved queueing for a long time, putting all ten of my fingers on a greasy touchpad that had seen thousands of grubby fingers in the last couple of hours already and was covered in the smeary remnants of other people's DNA and then answering questions put to me by a semi-literate man wearing latex gloves that were too big for him and who had cotton wool shoved in both ears. Welcome to the US of A!

"So, who are you staying with in San Francisco?"
"A friend."
"And how long have you known," he pauses to sneer, "this 'friend'?'"
"Er, I don't know him...he's a friend of my boyfriend."
Silence. Stamp, stamp, type, stamp, scan, type, look, stamp, type.
"What kind of work do you do in the Netherlands?"
I am prepared for this one. Must not mention the word 'writer'.
"I am a communication specialist," I say. He has no idea what that is. Neither do I.
Stamp, stamp, stamp, final look, stamp.
He's about to staple my visa card into my passport but realises there is something on the other side of the page he's chosen. He looks, sees that it's a visa for Russia and then gleefully jabs the staple right through it.
"Here you go ma'am, enjoy your stay."

We pick up our bags, pass by a disinterested customs officer and queue up to re-check them in. As we stand there, a man barks orders at a group of elderly nuns who shuffle towards him as fast as they can, which is not very fast because they are wearing sensible old lady nun-shoes, and cause chaos as people try to rush past them to get to the transfer desk. The lady at the transfer desk shouts "You gotta hurry!" when she realises our flight leaves in twenty minutes. So we rush off and wait for ages for the antiquated lifts. There does not seem to be any stairs in JFK. The queue for security is huge too, and there's a fat man bellowing at us in a thick New York accent like we are new army recruits. The inflection in his voice indicates that he's been repeating the phrases so loudly, so often and for so long that he doesn't actually know what he is saying anymore.

"MOVE IT! Shoes have got to come awf. Your jackets have got to come awf. Move it! Move it along. SHOES IN THE BAWKS. JACKETS IN THE BAWKS. LAPTOPS OUT OF YOUR BAYGS. Belts in the bawks. Empty your pawkets. Everything in the bawkses. Remember, EMPTY the pawkets! MOVE IT!" We shuffle along like sheep.

By the time we reach San Francisco International, I've realised that most Americans don't actually talk. They bark. I've realised that most Americans do not talk in full sentences either - they simply issue commands, recite statements in parrot fashion and tell you 'what you've gotta do'. I've also realised that almost everything in America is designed to involve the least amount of constructive thought conceivable and the least amount of interaction with other human beings as possible.

We collect our bags and I find it strange that the baggage carousels are in a space that is completely open to the public. We make our way to the BART, where I make the mistake of trying to ask the obese woman in the glass cubicle a question. She's as far away from the microphone as she can get and looks at me like I could potentially spray acid in her face if she moves a centimeter closer, even though there is bullet proof glass protecting her from me and me from her. She shrugs at me. I say I can't hear her and she screams "Well, whaddaya want?" at me. I ask which platform it is for Palo Alto station and she points angrily at a sign, which I had completely missed, and which says "Palo Alto: Platform 1".

We arrive in Palo Alto at about 21:00, which is 9:00 PM to Americans, a dangerous system of timekeeping which causes people like me to miss trains and planes. The town looks like toy town. It's clean and low-rise and is full of clean and rich Stanford University students, wild-haired professors and parking inspectors. There's countless cafes and boutique bathroom and carpet shops and a low proportion of crackheads oozing about on the street compared to the rest of San Francisco. The apartment we are staying in is right next door to the Facebook offices and is located on the upper floor of a retirement home, which is used for short-term rentals and is why the corridor smells like very strong old lady perfume and disinfectant that has been shaken up in a cocktail shaker and liberally thrown around. Although we are completely delirious, we go with Joao to an Italian restaurant where one bowl of pasta is so enormous that it feeds all three of us with plenty to spare and costs $12. We stay up as long as we can but eventually, words start dribbling out of my mouth in an order that I know is not correct but I can't do anything about it, and each time I blink, my eyelids stay closed for a fraction longer than last time I blinked. We cave in and hit the sack at midnight...

... part deux on its way shortly....