Arrival

Every airport experience is slightly different. At Heathrow there are miles of pointless corridors (which I'm sure go in circles), in Mexico there are guards who have to keep people's luggage from being stolen before they can even take it off the conveyor. In Russia there's endless officialdom. In Geneva I once passed through a passport check in which the checker was actually reading a book and giving no more than a bored nod at the passports as they were presented.

America regularly wins the prize for most surreal airport experiences. One time I arrived at customs in San Francisco to find the terrifying faces of Bush, Rumsfeld and Rice grinning down at me. There's normally a large draped flag or two, and signs explaining why border control is such an important and prestigious activity. The airport at Charlotte, North Carolina, at which I arrived yesterday, was the first airport where I'd ever seen the featureless and carefully neutral waiting-room seats replaced by lovely white rocking chairs.

I didn't use them for too long however, since I was soon to board another plane that would take me to the opposite corner of the country. The folks on the flight to Seattle clearly came from a different demographic; there was a greater abundance of headphones, hoodies and general hipness for a start, as well as lots of knowledgeable-looking business men and at least one bloke in a full length Matrix leather jacket. A guy in the seat in front of me had a mask over his nose and mouth. Either he had just done an important operation and forgotten to take it off, or he was really paranoid about swine flu. I made sure to cough and sneeze a lot anyway.

It's a great experience arriving in an American city, and Seattle is no exception. From the two bus trips it took to get to my first host's house I saw all the classic give-aways of US urbanity: the sky scrapers, the water fountains (by which I mean the kind you drink from, not the kind you look at - why do these brilliant things not exist in England?), the random people in a car that wished me happy Friday, the city-centre streets that are so wide that they would be a three lane motorway in England, the Starbucks on every corner.

I only had ten dollars on me, but the bus ticket was $1.75 and they didn't have change ("that's not how it works"). Fortunately, from the cross section I found on the bus, Seattlers are the nicest people on the planet. Someone gave me a spare ticket they had, and then someone else gave me another bus pass valid for my second journey. Two people were helping me work out where to get off. Arriving at last, I had a brief exchange with my (again) outrageously friendly host from couchsurfing.com (so much outwardness and kindness is very unsettling for a Brit like myself, born and bred on introversion) before collapsing onto a sofa and, what with having got about three hours' real sleep in the last 48, falling swiftly into unconsciousness.