We have landed in the US, Los Angeles (LAX) airport, and headed straight to passport control. Unlike many other countries, I have been to, here they collected my fingerprints and the control queue was long and slow. Finally, we collected our luggage and were ready to start our adventures in the US.
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Traffic and Cars
Cars look different there, and the streets were wide and traffic organized much better than in the UK or many parts of Europe. No surprise – this is a country of cars. You may be driving on a five-lane highway and may discover that nearly every car around you has only one person in it – the driver. The cars have been a way to express yourself for decades here. Worth noticing the driving culture is also quite different compared to Europe. Example: you’re driving in a third lane out of five but you should never expect that normal overtaking happens via left. The left lane is probably the slowest and overtaking happens like slalom via the left and via right. Good thing is that they don’t hesitate at the traffic lights, they just go. Engines are mostly big in all cars and even VW Jetta probably starts from 2.5L here. Big engines mean a huge demand for fuel. Petrol costs nearly half the European price when converted from gallons to liters and compared after currency conversion whereas fill-ups are not as painful as you would imagine in European prices. 5litre V8 – no problem, fill-up 40-50 dollars and you’re good to continue. Judging by the sound passing you by V6s and V8s are still quite a common thing in the US.
Note for petrol heads: unleaded costs $3-5 per US gallon, which starts as $0.79 per liter or £0.61 and €0.69 respectively as of October 2018.
Cities
Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco – they are huge cities of the United States. If you happen to be at the Griffith observatory and look into Los Angeles from the hill – you won’t be able to see the other end. It’s quite flat except for a couple of skyscrapers blocks, it seems like almost everyone is Living their American dream in their own house. If you go to San Francisco – it fascinated me by its steep streets and mega bridges, also worth mentioning are iconic trams. If you ever played computer game GTA (Grand Theft Auto), you may find some places familiar. Seems Rockstar company managed to model virtual cities with quite many essential views that reflect US cities, roads, streets, and in some cases even people on the street! Hollywood Hills, parts of Los Angeles, Beaches, Pacific Coast drive, bridges, roads, cars, houses, even some areas. That computer game reflects many mayor aspects of California. It made me feel so strange as if that was deja vu. Somehow strangely I felt as if I knew these places but actually only seen them only in the movies and replicated in computer games.
Seen all those movies people going wild, partying and getting lost? Go to Las Vegas – you’ll understand where those movies and stories get born!
People & Language
As you travel from Europe North to Western and Southern Europe, especially in those multicultural metropolitan cities you may discover people being more communicative, seem more friendly and open for a conversation. Once you end up in US West Coast, especially California you may find that people are even more relaxed there, you may find it so easy to acquaint yourself with new people on the street or get into a funny conversation with a cashier at the cafe or a random stranger passing by while you’re admiring the views. That indicates for me that people are possibly enjoying their life more and nearly all-year-long sunny climate may be contributing to that a lot. I find impossible to dislike that. What surprised me a lot was easiness to speak and understand in English without pardon or asking to repeat again. This is quite different in London from my experience, where I’ve spent nearly four years and I feel like even English people may find it difficult to understand each other at times.
Landscapes
You may travel for hundreds of miles and the road will still be a straight line till the horizon. As far as your eyes can see. The landscape may change quite quickly and become completely different from what you’ve just seen a 100 miles away. Every Valley and National Park has its own feature that significantly differs from another. All those areas are vast and you can’t really transfer that feeling in a picture or a video, you have to live those moments it to understand how spectacular they are. Death Valley with its dunes and endless mountains on asides, Yosemite with the hilly giant tree forests and huge masses of granite, Grand Canyon with the unique terrain carrying information about Earth geological history in the layered rocks, Pacific Coast with its volcanic shoreline and many other places we have been.
Mega Structures
I’ve been to quite a number of countries in Europe, but Hoover Dam with Mike O’Callaghan bridge next to it, massive San Francisco Bridges, Terminal Island with its bridges and mass industrial zone in Los Angeles – all left me wondering about how has a man built these hard to imagine structures. Add a breathtaking SpaceX rocket launch in the night sky which we happened to see while visiting Griffiths Observatory. All these first-world experiences, an understanding and feeling the scale of the world and humanity’s progress over the last hundred years make you breath more deeply.
Little adventure
We were heading towards Yosemite National Park from San Francisco. As we’ve spent quite a lot of time stuck in the evening traffic, we realized we’ll be covering today’s remaining distance in the dark. And things were going as it should as we kept driving. It was dead black, you could not see much more than just the road lit up by the car’s headlights. Judging by the navigation screen, also straights and hills of the road we must have been driving along with farming areas. The road was nice, hills, bends, and straights – you can not get bored. As we kept driving we came up to the point when we had to refuel and that was where the normal things as we were used to – have changed. Stopped at the petrol station – cars around damaged, missing parts, looked like soon falling apart, to keep it in one piece were wrapped with tape. Not a very safe feeling while looking at our fresh rental Cadillac. People walking around were also strange (and looked rather dangerous) as well as the music within the station. I could say it felt like the wrong turn to end up in that place. Then fun continued as we tried to get back onto the main road. It was somewhere above, but there was no ramp. Our navigation was a bit lost when the sights reminded me of something I’ve only seen in the movies or computer games (referring to GTA). Homeless were living in cars, tents or simply outside on the ground. They were burning a fire in the trash cans and lots of mess all around. Everything seemed familiar, however not quite fun at the same time. I thought “I’ve definitely seen something like that in the GTA” – and this “deja vu” moment was one of many that I’ve experienced while we were traveling around those few states of the US. But finally, we found our way back onto the main road and continued.
Overall
My impressions about my first trip to the United States are very positive and I would definitely recommend exploring it. Not only major cities but go to National Parks, drive for hours and days, let yourself discover things by surprise as i.e. setting random locations on the map and going there. I am now thinking that the amount of wow feelings we experienced in two weeks is exceeding any of the European trips we had before.
P.S. I’ve put some hand-picked images together in a gallery below as usual! Jump to the photo gallery!
