Coming to America

I have had to come to Los Angeles on business. I enjoy traveling and will be glad to be able to see many of my coworkers again, but at the same time I want to be in Italy trying to improve my Italian.

Los Angeles is a long way from Todi.

My alarm went off at 4:45 AM in Todi. A quick shower and half a bite of breakfast later I was on the road with Leonardo. I was pleased to be able to manage some small conversation with him, sometimes with the assistance of the dictionary on my iPad. He had also had a short night, as a customer had him coming from Ancona on the Adriatic finishing at midnight. We stopped for coffee, eventually. It is easy to find coffee in Italy at midnight. Less so at 6 AM when you actually need the stuff.

By 7:15 Leonardo had me at Fiumicino in ample time for my 9:30 flight. I bought breakfast and a book to read: Lo Hobbit.

The first leg of my flight, to Atlanta, was as uneventful as you want a flight to be. We had little turbulence, so I was mostly able to stretch my legs whenever I wanted. The woman next to me did not get out of her seat the entire flight. I cannot even imagine.

She also turned up her nose at most of the food served, which is a lot easier to imagine. You don't need to know all the details, but I do have to tell you about a snack/lunch that was served: a sandwich and a chocolate. The sandwich was panino MAYBE two inches long, with a proportional amount of meat and cheese. It was the sandwich equivalent of Alexandra's car: so tiny it was cute. The funniest part, though, was that it came with a packet of mustard. A 15 g packet of mustard. There was more mustard than meat and cheese combined, plus most of the bun. Oh, the chocolate was an 18 g Mars bar, which made it about twice the size of the smallest individually wrapped Mars snack bits.

The only part of my trip I was a little concerned about was my connection in Atlanta. I had only 90 minutes including immigration, customs, and going back through security.

Compared to Italy, America takes immigration very seriously. In Italy the officer waved us through without looking at our passports. In Atlanta I was asked to explain my business while the officer checked my documents carefully. How do you quickly explain that you are a resident of the US temporarily living in Italy and that you have returned for business?

I made it through security again and then looked up my departure gate. A21. Yes, you can technically be further from Concourse F, but not by a whole lot. Happily, the Atlanta airport has a train system that whisked me the mile in a few minutes. I arrived at my departure gate with just enough time to freshen up in the restroom before boarding.

The flight to Los Angeles ended up being delayed. Apparently the previous pilot had done something to overheat the brakes on the left wheel carriage, and as a result those brakes had fused to the disks (we learned from the pilot that the plane had 8 disks per wheel, whereas your car has one and Alexandra's car has none). They couldn't free some spacer, so they ended up putting on a whole new wheel.

Even long-haul domestic flights have turned into pay-for-service. I availed myself of everything I could get for free. For the 5 hour flight this turned out to be 4 packets of peanuts and 2 cups of Coke. Movies? Si paga. A meal? Si paga. A headset for watching the free TV? Si paga. Mostly I slept through this leg.

In LA I just had to ride the SuperShuttle to the hotel. After looping thorough the airport twice to find more paying customers, it finally headed out and I made it to the hotel at 8:15 PM, exactly 24 hours after leaving Todi.

Oh, Lo Hobbit? I almost made it through the first chapter today. I was trying to stretch my iPad battery, so I had to be careful with my use of the dictionary. But also I really need to learn the preterite, past perfect, preterite perfect, future perfect, past conditional, and the subjunctive mood in order to make quicker work of a historical fiction. Getting vocabulary from context or a dictionary is one thing, but parsing the verbs to understand what is going on is another.

Michael