The USA

The weather was warm, dry and sunny and despite my concerns about US customs I sailed through with no major problems.  Out on the street I was reminded very quickly that I was in Hollywood as I was stood next to Keiffer Sutherland waiting to cross the road. Then as I crossed the road Tricky, the singer/rapper from Bristol, crossed the road in front of me. Welcome to Hollywood!  My cousin had arranged a shuttle to their house in Westlake and the over-sizing began with the shuttle bus driver. He was pretty big. He also expected me to give him directions to where I was going. A bit strange considering I'm a Brit being picked up from an international airport. He complained about this as the journey went  and I was struck by his incredible laziness. I didn't know at the time but this was a representative introduction to West coast American service.

I had planned a short visit to the States catching up with friends and family rather than seeing the country. First stop was my cousin Iqbal and his family where I would base myself. I haven't been to America in 11 years and I have only been to LA but it really hasn't changed very much. It was nice to see Iqbal and the family again as I don't get to see them much. We had a couple of days together and then I hired a car and went to Glendale to meet an old Armenian friend of my fathers from Iran called Vartan. Glendale is a town east of LA which holds the largest Armenian community outside Armenia and Iran and is a little like being in Tehran with Persian and Armenian food everywhere and the same climate as Iran. In fact California is so close to Iran in terrain and weather it's small wonder that the largest Iranian community outside Iran is in California. On the way I dropped in on another Iranian friend called Parviz and his wife who run a dental practice on Wilshire Boulevard in LA. Last time I was in LA I stayed with them. They were very surprised to see me so we made arrangements to meet up later and I went on to see Vartan who used to ski with my dad in Iran. Last time I was in America we had a really good time and they are lovely people.

The driving in California is terrible. They drive in robotic trains as if they are driving in the only direction that exists and everyone must be going the same way. They don't signal, don't give way and can't seem to compute or react to anything out of their pre programmed journey. They don't know how to brake either. At 90MPH on the freeway they will stamp on the brake pedal for no apparent reason what so ever. The car is just an extension of the living room where people sit, eating and drinking whilst on the phone and oblivious to the world around them and this oblivious attitude became apparent throughout American life as the trip went on. That morning I had been contacted by my friend and colleague Adri, a photographer I work with in London. He was going to be in New Mexico the following week and invited me down to work with him so I set about making the arrangments. I stayed with Vartan for a couple of nights before he headed off to Armenia and then went back to Iqbal's via Santa Monica up Pacific Coast Highway to Malibu. PCH is what you imagine California to look like. As you cruise up the coast surfers unload their boards from their cars in the sun and girls roller blade on the board walk. It's a great commute. Back at the house I spent a few days with the kids and Iqbal. We went to a birthday party at a bowling ally on the weekend which sounded like fun. I was introduced to the father of the boy whose birthday it was and he seemed very jolly and happy in his loud Hawaiian shirt and bermuda shorts having just parked his Hummer outside. 'So you've been around the world huh?! That's great, what was your favourite place?' ... 'Laos' ... 'Really what did you like so much?' ....'It was like stepping back 500 years. Their way of life is different and so amazing' I said. And I'd lost him. He seemed to just lose the ability to talk and looked at me like I was talking some strange foreign language. 'Great, great....Laos' he said and he just walked off! He briefly spoke to me again saying 'Laos huh....great, great' and walking off again. That obliviousness again. Californians seem to live in a bubble and the outside world is totally irrellavent to them.

The weekend was soon over and it was time for me to go to New Mexico. I left at 5am on the Monday morning flying from Burbank this time which is a small, and that morning, a rather chaotic airport. My flight was from Burbank to Albuquerque, via Denver. The only other option was to fly via San Francisco which seemed ludicrous. The flight went well but as we landed in Denver I felt the plane was coming in to land but couldn't see any land or ski or horizon. We just never seemed to leave the cloud and this seemed very disconcerting until suddenly as we got close to the ground I realised I couldn't see it because it was white. Denver was covered in snow and a freak blizzard was raging! I only had a fleece and a couple of T-shirts. The temperature in LA had been 100 and Denver was 30 which made me worry a little about the temperature in New Mexico. I went into the terminal to wait for my next flight and found that all flights were delayed by at least 2 hours due to the freak snow storm and the queue for deicing. We were then all told to get on the plane and sat there for 5 hours! Yes 5 hours sat in a plane burning fuel. I was sat next to Navaho Indian from Arizona who was very sweet and funny. She was at a teaching conference with a group from her community and some of them had not been on a plane before. As we talked she told me that she has a niece who is a single mother and is in the army stationed in Germany. She was apparently due to be sent to Iraq which they were very fearful of. I couldn't believe that there was actually a chance that a single mother would be posted there and this reminded me that I was in a country that is at war.

Eventually I arrived in Albuquerque and met up with Adri. It was strange to see him after some 11 months but only because it was not very strange at all. It seemed like I'd only seen him yesterday and we went off to pick the car up. We decided to drive straight to Santa Fe a couple of hours north. Arriving in Santa Fe we booked into a motel and went to a diner. Santa Fe is a nice town with a very weekend away tourist feel and we had a look around before heading to Los Alamos where the first atomic bomb was developed. We went into the Bradbury Science Museum in Los Alamos where the history of the bomb's development is on display which felt like a celebration of the bomb and somehow didn't feel right. Of course some Americans feel it was right to drop the bomb. We asked if we could take some pictures and one woman was very nice and helpful. Another woman who worked there came over and seemed to be an irritant to her. Her expression seemed to say 'Oh god she's going to speak'.  As we setup our gear the second woman came over and said 'Please could you keep me out of your pictures as I work with counter insurgency and I don't want to be identified'.  She stared strangely which was due to the amount of Collagen and botox she had pumped into her face and I suspected she had had a face lift too as her face seemed a little tightly stretched over her bulging eyes. Her nose had also been done. Looking at her in her brightly coloured clothes I realised that we had found the twilight zone. In fact I think we were at the centre. I got the feeling over the next few days that the 'Twilight Zone' had not been a sci-fi TV drama at all but more an early reality TV series based in a small American town. I had found it hard to keep a straight face talking to Mrs. X (we wouldn't want to reveal her identity now would we) as she slurred her words probably because of the prosak or valium. Adri had to remind me to remain composed. There were a few elderly visitors as we set the camera up and one man enquired what we were doing. We had a discussion with him about the bomb and combat and this led to the current combat in Iraq. His rational was astounding, 'we wouldn't have to be at war but the bad people have the oil' he said. If only he knew! I knew American thought like this but I was still taken a back to hear this as he was nice friendly and quite open man in his 80's who looked like he is probably a great granddad. People just think in the craziest way. The oil has been there for thousands of millions of years and the people have been there since the beginning of civilisation, but because Americans want to drive their Hummers we become the bad people because they don't like paying for their oil. It's incredible.

We stayed in Los Alamos that night after having to make do with some super market food which we ate in front of the telly as everything shuts so early out there. You can eat late as long as you're happy to eat junk. We hit the road for Taos next morning and also took in the Rio Grande again which we had seen from another point the night before. It was very beautiful and is like a mini Grand Canyon. We covered a lot of ground and at the end of the day headed back to Albuquerque stopping at Los Alamos again to try a Vietnamese place we had seen the night before. It was great and relieved the severe food boredom we were feeling. We stayed in an airport hotel and the next day were both flying out, me to LA and Adri to London. I flew via Denver again and this time my connection was over booked so they offered a free internal round trip flight to anyone who was willing to miss the flight and fly later that day. I jumped at the chance and went to get some Mexican food as you don't get fed on internal American flights, much to my annoyance. I also rerouted to LAX so arriving back in LA I went to pick up a car and headed back to Iqbal and Jamie's house and to another weekend with the family. The weather again was fabulous and over the weekend we went for Persian food, hung out in the jackouzi and I went to Yoga class with Jamie which was pretty cool. Then it was off to Malibu for an evening with Parvis and family at their house on top of the seafront by Pepperdine University campus on PCH. It's an amzing house overlooking the sea and sunset. More Persian food and I set off down PCH to Orange County to visit my cousin Kian whom I had seen in Bangkok when I stayed with his father Kew.  I arrived late and met his mum briefly before we headed off to his place. We only had 2 days but I got an idea of Orange County at least.

And that is the Californian experience, a bubble where the rest of the world doesn't really exist or if it does it is in some kind of parallel universe. Anyway after the brief visit it was time for me to catch my plane and fly to NYC from LAX. I thought I had a direct flight but I was flying via Chicago on the red eye. Chicago was a surprise from the sky. It has massive residential suburbs but the high rise city area on the coast is tiny. But that was all I saw. Then back on the same plane to LaGuardia airport in New York and after some haggling and aggravation over my ski bag, I got a shuttle to Greenwich Village where my cousin Babak lives. On the drive over New York was another surprise and looks really quaint and pretty in an unkempt kind of way a bit like London. I was very surprised how much like London it is in fact.

I haven't seen Babak for many years and he's changed quite a lot. We went off into town for a look around heading straight for Ground Zero which is surprising again in that it's such a small area and some very old buildings close to the twin towers were unaffected. They literally came straight down. One building very close is warped from the heat. It's a huge building and claims that it is warped and dangerous have been denied. I spent a few days seeing the town including the Empire state where the queue was massive but the view was excellent. The Empire state itself was pretty under whelming as a building and the tourist circus they have setup inside is ridiculous. The Chrysler building is stunning however. After the Empire state I went to MOMA, The Museum of Modern Art, which was great.  It's not the Tate Modern but great. The metro is good but like all big cities it has a system that takes a while to understand. Best of all though the food improved at last. There is plenty of good, cheap food in New York and no strip malls.

For the weekend I went to Phillidelphea to visit Tom and Amanda who I met in Queenstown in New Zealand. They were good fun and invited me over to spend an evening in Pennsilvania and Philli. I got the New Jersey link train from Penn Station and they picked me up. Tom and Amanda took me for Cheese stake, pizza and cheesy chips.  Not healthy but good. and that evening I went out with Tom and the boys to a local bar where we had a fair few beers after which we did burn outs all the way home in the V8 pickup truck while they whooped out of the window! Can't get more American than that, although the truck was Japanese. In the morning we got up and all went for breakfast at a diner followed by a lovely Italian lunch back at the house and then I was on the move again back to New York where I was straight out to dinner with Babak and some friends in 'The Village'. And that was it all of a sudden. The next morning I was getting ready to leave. Babak was flying to Paris and so we took a car to the airport that evening and checking in I was all of a sudden on my way home spending the last night of my trip on a 747 over the Atlantic. America was such a blur I didn't really think about getting home. After 11 months and 2 weeks I arrived in London to warm weather in November where my parents met me at the Airport.

I've been back about 3 weeks and I'm working already mostly on freelance web design and in the studio a little where I got to look at my film from the trip for the first time. It's been a bit strange to be home but not in the ways I had expected. I've been super busy which is why I haven't written for a while and I guess I'll have to write a mail about home. Anyway I'm home now for those who didn't know so say Hi. Somehow I'm not sure I'll be around that long ;o)

Ciao,

Kaveh.