USA Part 2 – We arrive

The veggie food in this flight was sour. I don’t know if it was something to do with the excess mustard or whether there was something wrong in the dish – it just tasted very sour. In the previous flight the small masala dosa tasted great. I didn’t eat anything else on this flight except a bun and a Kitkat chocolate. I learnt that the gaming option was only available in the Premium economy class – must be one of the cost cutting strategies of airlines; nowadays you had two levels in economy class itself! It is a wonder how airlines manage to have their flights almost completely full – this was one of the rare flights were I found many empty seats. Unfortunately I had a window seat in this flight but on the bright side there was no one sitting in the middle seat – so there was enough space to stretch my legs. I walked around the flight only once - you can’t keep disturbing the person on the aisle every hour!

I watched a German movie with English subtitles – something about the camera murders; it was slow paced and had a typical open ending that we see these days in plenty of movies (even Indian ones; the culprit was shown but nothing about whether he was caught or not) – the ending is left to the viewer’s imagination. The story was more on the lines that you couldn’t trust people easily – someone who at first might seem to be charming might just happen to be the villain. It dealt with the issue by following two couples and the disappearance of kids in the deserted area where they vacation. Soon each one starts suspecting someone else but no one knows for sure. I didn’t find it that interesting and after the movie I dozed off. When I woke up we had already landed! In both the flights, I slept through the landing.

The first stop coming out of the airport was the immigration counter. My friend and I took out the papers we needed – this was it; there were people who have been sent back from here! The time was 1:30pm and there didn’t seem to be any other flight that arrived at this time. By the time we were done with sorting out our papers, most of the crowd had disappeared. My friend used to say, “Fatigue helps – it reduces the rush of adrenaline.” And I guess both of us were pretty relaxed and calm after the lengthy journey. As we waited in queue, I was watching at what was being played on the lcd screens. The videos were meant to inform passengers about the procedures that would happen in immigration and customs – the aim was to avoid intimidating passengers by the formalities. We had a few standard questions and then had our passport stapled with the I-94 card.

First step in the city

The temperature was not in the negative; as we travelled in the cab, we could see blocks of hardened snow all over. The cab driver seemed to be the type of person who liked to talk freely but neither me nor my friend made much of a conversation. We were just looking out of the window trying to absorb as much of the place as we could. I, as usual, dozed off on the way!
We went up to the apartment block and found that we couldn’t open the door; a guy noticed from the balcony and came down to open the door for us. I touched the hardened snow and tried to grab a little piece on my hand – it felt pretty much like ice. We picked our keys and headed to our room – 2nd floor and the place looked very cozy. From our balcony we could see a little white hill – covered by a sheet of snow.