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Our Adventures in America volume 1...

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My fiancée and I are taking a year off to travel, and the first stop on the trip has be the U.S. We've been here a little more than a month now, and it's high time I recorded my impressions of the place. In short, the place has gotten really weird. Or perhaps it was always weird, and it's taken an extended period away from the place to notice. I no longer feel as though I come from America, and I'm certain I don't belong here.

We landed in Seattle in mid-June. Going through Immigration went remarkably smoothly, considering the draconian language of the State Department's web site and horror stories heard from friends. Baiba can stay in the U.S. for three months without a visa thanks to Latvia's recent inclusion in the visa waiver program. The program allows businesspeople and tourists from a list of vetted countries to enter the U.S. without applying for a visa, which makes traveling much easier. The disadvantage of using the visa waiver program is that the final decision whether or not to let you into the country rests with the immigration officer at the border, and you waive your right to appeal his decision by traveling under the program. So if for some reason the tired, underpaid border guard doesn't like the cut of your jib, it's back on a plane without so much as a hearing. Our own experience was fairly sedate. We got the “good cop” version of the immigration officer, a very handsome smiling young black woman. She asked us the usual questions: how long are you staying, where is Latvia, does Baiba have a job... Baiba displayed very good sense when she answered that she wasn't working, which was true. She was worried about the border people looking askance at her lack of employment and had considered fibbing and telling them that she was still employed by the cosmetics company she had just quit, but it occurred to her that if she had the very next question would have been how she was able to take so much time off to travel. Smart girl; rule number 1 of going through immigration is do not lie.

Having cleared immigration, our next challenge was coping with American public transportation systems, specifically the one in Seattle. Seattle is a city that chooses to study problems for several decades before taking action, and that means traffic keeps piling up as blue-ribbon commissions, city planners, and militant neighborhood associations jostle each other over a solution to the problem. Honestly, I'm not sure how the most well-funded bus system could cope with Seattle roads and traffic, but Seattle's critically underfunded public transportation system has no chance at all. From Columbia City, a section of Seattle where we were staying, it took almost an hour to reach downtown, even though it was less than six miles away. That time was spent waiting for the bus, sitting in traffic with all kinds of vaguely threatening and mentally unstable bus riders, and walking for ten minutes when the bus broke down. Later in Seattle I discovered I could have flown to New York City in the time it took to go to and from a prosthetics appointment on the opposite side of town on public transport. I can't really blame anyone for wanting a car in a large American city, and yet everyone having a car makes these cities unbearable.

Our itinerary took us from Seattle to Portland, OR, and then down the coast to Newport and Langlois where my parents live. Baiba didn't like Seattle. She said it made her feel doomed. To be fair, she had a nasty cold while we visited so she wasn't really able to have much fun, but her impressions were nevertheless unfavorable and familiar to me. Although Baiba has been hardened by riding the bus with all manner of drunks and malcontents in Riga, she felt unsafe on the Seattle bus system. The combination of aggressive youths staring either lecherously or hostilely and the mentally ill really got to her. She also complained about the architecture. Europeans are not well equipped to deal with the monotony of most American neighborhoods, which roll past the car window as an endless presentation of power lines, shabby houses and apartment blocks, and corner malls. When she posted pictures of Seattle on Draugiem.lv, a social networking site in Latvia, her readers reacted with dismay. Not all the news was bad, however. Baiba enjoys America for what we do best: shopping! Dresses! Shoes! We stormed Seattle's “vintage” stores and had satisfaction. America is the land of abundance, and sizes are even available for the long of leg and full of breast. They say to enjoy a place you need to follow the locals' example, so we shopped.

My reactions to being back in Seattle and America were more mixed. I have friends here and I'm always excited to see them. I know restaurants here and I'm always eager to eat at them. I like cheap electronics, and I can usually find them. I've found myself, however, swimming upstream against the flow of life in this country. My first reaction was jealousy. We stayed in the new and well-appointed home of Seattle Joe, a former coworker from the Amazon days. Here I encountered all the things I left behind when I left America: matching flatware, a Kitchen Aid mixer, and enough money to buy a bottle of wine without sweating it. I missed those things, until I heard what their owners had to do to keep them: business trips, long days, bosses, losses, and the general malaise of the workaday life. Would I go back to that life? Never! And yet being around nice things made me feel a bit of a pang. Living well means being able to do what you want, but buying what you want isn't too bad either...

When we first arrived here, I entertained the thought of us moving back to the U.S.. Now, at the end of the U.S. leg of the trip, I'm finding that possibility increasingly remote. There is only one way to live here, and that's to have a car and a full time job. How else to get access to health insurance? What I can't figure out is how do live differently here, without access to enormous sums of money or enduring grinding poverty. Perhaps a solution will present itself, but until it does, we will search elsewhere.