Utrecht - Los Angeles

Today was the day. The day that I had not been looking forward to for months. I had been way too busy fixing a student visa, answering questions like “Are you a spy/terrorist?”, “Have you ever been involved in genocide?” and “Are you planning on ending up in prostitution?”. And getting into courses, for which international students apparently need to email the assistant of the barber of the head of department of a certain section of the University of California. And applying for waivers, extensions, housing… Anyway, although all these preparations had been made, I woke up the 31st of December realizing I should probably start packing as I was leaving the next day.

                Assuming that Americans see Europeans as exotic, I packed the most Dutch pairs of pants I had. Then I remembered that I was going to be away for seven months and put the remaining content of my closet into my Texas-sized bag. Seriously, I packed more than 20 T-shirts. Barely celebrating New Year I stayed up until 4 am to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything. The next morning I got to Schiphol two and a half hours early so that I could say goodbye to Maren and Femke (who had pulled an all-nighter to see me), my mom, my dad, and my brother properly. However, when checking in my bag (that turned out to be 23 kg exactly!) I found out that the boarding time had been changed so that I had to be at the gate in 15 minutes. Thus, a quick goodbye to everyone who’d taken so much effort to be there so early, and then, when I walked through passport control and waved one more time, the excitement hit me. I was leaving everyone behind and was going on an adventure of seven months, and I couldn’t go back.

Saying goodbye to everyone

                Security went surprisingly fine, and when the plane left (at the original time…) I immediately got into a conversation with the woman sitting next to me. Her name was Cynthia. She had spent the holidays with her German husband, and was on her way back to her ten year old son in North Carolina. When I asked her to explain this situation an intriguing story came to light. For one of her classes in high school, Cynthia had had a pen pal in Germany. They wrote each other about everything until they were about 25, and then they slowly got out of touch. Then, about 15 years later when both of them had a family, they found each other on Facebook and decided to meet up. Here they fell in love, divorced their partners and married a few months later. Now they travel up and down regularly to see each other, but for now both want to stay in the country where their children live. She also told me that she had studied philosophy, her favourite philosopher was Sartre and during her studies she was a big stoner (exactly the reason why she knew her way around Amsterdam). She works in the pharmaceutic branch, and has lost two good friends and her brother to pancreatic cancer. A few hours later we were best friends, mainly because she had a great sense of humour and acted like a teenager who had never grown up (but could have been my mother). When we got to Philadelphia I went through immigration and she helped me get to my gate. She gave me her business card and invited me to her house, whenever I would be in North Carolina. That moment I decided to always start a conversation with people I’m sitting next to on a plane.

My first view of the land of freedom

                In “Philly” I transferred to a plane with bigger seats. What I’m going to tell you next is not a joke: the man sitting next to me requested a safety belt extension. The flight attendant immediately got one for him without even blinking. Apparently a very common thing in the US, but I was flabbergasted. And slightly annoyed because the man should really have paid for one and a half seats. Then a guy walked into the plane, and I immediately was sure that I’d seen his face before. I just could not remember where, so I couldn’t really approach him. Once everyone was sitting in their place, we had to wait for an hour because there was a suitcase jam for the luggage of international transfer passengers. Feeling kind of guilty, I started a conversation with the woman sitting on my other side. She turned out to be going to a “retreat” of three days somewhere in California, in order to get mindful and set her goals for the coming year, together with a group. During this flight my jetlag was catching up on me, since it felt like five in the morning. I slept, I made a puzzle, and I folded some origami (thank you SinterKaho). Once we finally flew over Los Angeles, the sight was astonishing. The lights went on and on, and the highways looked like rivers of tiny little headlights.

In real life it looked so much better

                When all the passengers walked to the baggage claim, I encountered the guy I had recognized, and decided to approach him. “Hey, I’m sorry, but are you a famous Youtuber or something?” – “Ehhm, no.” … - “Are you sure? I’m sure I’ve seen your face before and I’ve never been in this country so it has to be the internet.” – “No man I’m sorry, I do work in television but I’ve never acted..”. So that didn’t really go as planned, although I’m a 1000% percent sure that one of these days I will remember what I recognize him from and feel ludicrous for not knowing it at the right moment. Oh well… Then I waited at the baggage claim. And I waited. And I waited. At one point there were only about 10 people left waiting and we soon found out that we had one thing in common: we had all been international transfer passengers at Philadelphia. Clearly something was wrong, although the lady at the help desk didn’t seem to agree with that.

Sarah's welcome sign

At that point the saviour of my life, Sarah Joyce McGee, appeared at the (wrong) terminal. With a super sweet sign (see photo) she gave me a warm welcome. After waiting another hour together we indeed heard that my bag had not been loaded into the plane and was still in Philadelphia. At this point I had been awake for about 26 hours and I was already happy that they at least knew where my bag was. After a small discussion we agreed that my bag would be delivered at Sarah’s place the day after, and off we were. After a 30-minute drive and a microwave pasta I finally got into the bed of Sarah’s roommate. I was asleep as soon as I touched my pillow.