June 17, 2004
When I handed my 10 year working visa and other documents to the US immigration officer, disguised behind a Chinese face, in a very serious but friendly voice he declared: „Miss Lakner, we seem to have a problem here!” I was more than surprised but luckily I only had to pick the same form with a different colour and put down the address of Lonely Planet (I forgot to bring my friends’ address) and answer the questions (of which I give you some samples below) before they took my fingerprints and a photo of my eyes...
The form contained questions using such a high level of English vocabulary and grammar that I was not sure that some of the Mexican or Japanese visitors standing in the queue would not answer yes instead of no sometimes. So here we go, look out for words like „turpitude, excluded, deported, detained, retained, withheld custody of, waive any rights” or „asserted immunity from prosecution”:
„Have you ever been...
... arrested or convicted for an offense or a crime involving moral turpitude or a violation related to a controlled substance; ....for which the aggregate sentence to confinement was five years or more...?
...involved with espionage or sabotage... or genocide, or between 1933 and 1945 were you involved in any way, in persecutions associated with Nazi Germany or its allies?
The answer I have furnished are true...
I hereby waive any rights to review or appeal of an immigration officer’s determination as to my admissibility, or to contest, other than on the basis of an application for asylum, any action in deportation.”
This last sentence really raised my eyebrow along with my blood pressure. When I discovered the sweetest thing at the bottom of the form in small letters: „If you have a comment on making the form simpler write to...” and just had to smile...
Then came the fun of unpacking my big and small bag that contained endless treasures of Indonesia, Thailand, Cambodia and other dangerous Muslim countries. The funny black man who directed me to the smiling Chinese officer was a real sweetie joking with everyone all day. Since this time they found no explosives on my panties (Like a year ago by mistake in England) I was let go free after a short little hour passed by with the repacking of the 20-kg-memories. :)
The first night near the airport was spent with eating tasty pizzas, looking for internet and meeting the local residents from the neighbourhood, namely a black man on the street at night whose self introduction was the following: „Hey blahndie!... Ah need nahdy-nahn sence for ma hot cheetoes. I been to prison fer fahv years, man. Only 99 sence...” and to make his point he showed us his prison card and the dates on it...
I knew there were prisons nearby but I didn’t know that the first thing convicts get on they leave was a free bus ticket on Greyhound buses. So, I got a little introduction to Californian sociology and got to se a few interesting faces in the couple of next days while travelling around San Diego and Palm Springs on the Greyhound buses with my friends from Tahiti. (The reason I did this was to kill time until my friend in SF could answer my e-mail. But at the end I gave up waiting and headed to my next destination without being pampered by my good friend’s hospitality. Never mind, next time I see her! :)) By the way, I have travelled before in the southern states of the US 4 years ago but I realized only now how much I missed out on real life by using a rented car instead of the local public transport.
The funniest thing is that I never felt so unsafe in any country before or after as on the bus from Palm Springs to LA in the safest (or at least best checked by security) country in the world. My company were mainly black and Latino people with crazy tattoos, worn out smileless faces with an empty or piercing look. The few woman among the many hardy man were a big mama with purple bruises around her black eyes holding an unhealthy-looking depressed baby and some shouting whores at the bus stop. This generally negative atmosphere did not change when I got onto my next bus in downtown LA. The white people on the buses were also miserable looking. Unlike in Asia where you often see even the poorest smiling, here more money and better living standards seem to give less opportunity for a cloudless face than in the east!)
But let me go back for a moment to Palm Springs bus station. If I hadn’t been there myself, I would’ t have believed it. It was like participating in a Tarantino film. The setting is a dry desert in a southern state of America with a few artificially planted palm trees, a homeless red Indian woman with a rugged face and battered clothes sitting on, what seems to me, all her possessions, steadily staring towards the surrounding mountains that bare only windfarms. Doing all this next to the almost empty, therefore probably the world’s sleepiest little bus station with a white-haired black clerk at the ticket counter paralyzed by the sound of a bursting radio, that was actually bursting in the exact fashion of the memorable ending scene of Pulp Fiction (...and my name is the Lord!...) and about the same subject, only, this time it was dead real!... I watched him for 10 long minutes before he turned to me to greet me with a sneer that anywhere else but here would have looked so out of place... He chose the perfect moment that for some strange reason yet hidden from me exactly coincided with the entering of a gnomelike black man with the most unusual hairstyle and an unmistakable crazy glow so familiar from homicide documentaries... Well, so much for my education by the media he casually enquired from me: „You sing?” along with a guitar imitation that must have been one of Jimi Hendrix’s solo. I said yes which made him add: „Jazz, yeah?” and without waiting for the answer he went on talking to the morose clerk, whose reluctant attitude gave away a spirit of annoyance and routine at the same time.... (You can imagine how sorry I am that most of the time I was too surprised or afraid to take photos all of these... ;))
Another aspect of American reality dawned on me through my struggle of trying to get the most simple task of changing my flight dates to Mexico and Guatemala. For if you want anything to get done in the US you need to talk to at least 4 people before you get somebody who actually knows something about their job and not giving you false information. It is a test you can do with almost anything. You only need time, patience, and perseverance and a little luck to finally find someone who actually has the same information as you that has worked in 10 other countries before without a question in need... Oh, yes. The beauty of task oriented work force, where it is actually considered a drawback to have more than 2 brain cells that can actually have a thought on their own... But I must admit that sometimes life makes it worth suffering for a good cause. This time the reward was a very chatty office worker who was so excited about my previous travel route that she not only did her job well but engaged in a conversation with me that was more than uplifting for my tired spirit at that time. ;)
The warm goodbye present I received on my leave from the US is also worth a note. Noone has politely asked me at the LA airport to open my bag for security reasons. Perhaps they considered it unnecessary for they must have known they would check it anyway. The only problem being: they failed to offer me an alternative. To what exactly? To my ripped bag, broken zip, disappeared lock and the mess they smeared all over my bag, all the contents of my liquidy stuff that was smiling at me now freed out of those ugly bottles that prevented them experiencing a sense of freedom, that I could only describe with two word: let loose. And what did the little note they carefully placed hidden among the seemingly bomb attacked bag said? Basically that it was the doing of the US government who found it necessary to keep to security regulations... and no compensation of any form applies. You can imagine how I stared at my ransacked belongings in disbelief and how hard I looked for the short word of „sorry” on that piece of paper...
But my dear friend, do not get the wrong impression. I love all the things about America that are worthy of loving (for example, the bottomless juices ;)) and, well, I note all those which are not... Everywhere there are good people in the world and some strange ones for the fun, too. I am happy to have a friendship of some exceptional American people, who, yes, actually live in one of the nicest cities in the country, San Francisco. ;)
Take care, my friends, and get ready for the last one and a half country I visit this time. :)
Tiglis