That was the longest trip I’ve ever made. Now it wasn’t actually boring nor was it particularly uncomfortable, it’s just that had some chinese guy sitting next to me that decided he was going to take up all the arm rests and go to sleep from the word go for like 6 hours. There was no British courtesy in any of his actions, so that annoyed me a bit.

Then we arrive into LAX. My brother had warned me that was to expect ‘special’ treatment as an Arab. In a way then I was completely calm about the situation that I found myself into. I’ve got to say that the people working there were extremely courteous however it makes you wonder exactly what the system was/is trying to achieve or prove.

So he gets my parent’s passports out of the way and then he asks me if I’ve registered before. Seeing as this is my first time in America, of course I hadn’t. So he walks me to the other end of the airport. While he’s walking the blue line (seriously it was a blue line on the ground with arrows), he gets asked by the people there:

Where you going?

VIP coming through.

To which they gave a little laugh at, of course I understood that my time in LAX airport was about to be extended somewhat. An hour of waiting later I had been through the process, which involves filling out a form (which I’d already filled out for my visa application form, so I don’t know what the real reason behind this actually was). They had my finger prints and photo both taken in the embassy and on my visa itself, so it just makes me wonder why I had to go through that. Luckily I wasn’t completely alone, as I’m sitting there and I’ll generally speaking, talk to anyone. I get to talking with the guy sitting right opposite me, turns out it’s Said who’s got Iranian roots. We sat there dicussing ‘war’ stories of how we’ve been treated in airports throughout our lives. It was very funny, because everyone was really serious around us, pissed off at being there and here were these two idiots laughing their asses off.

So we get out of LAX finally and onto the highway, aka the freeway. It’s an interesting concept. The massive roads go through the cities at high level. You get off at various junctions and travel DOWN to get to different residential areas, with mainly fast food places and petrol stations.

We pulled into one of those where I had a cream cheese and butter bagel, thus came my first taste of America.