One of the longest days in our lives. We woke up really early, around four. Our suitcases were packed already, and it took some effort to bring them down the helical stairs to the lobby of the hotel. I talk briefly to the concierge - my Hungarian is now as good as it once was - she'd like to go to America too.
The Hungarian passport control takes a very long look at our passports, I almost get the sense that they envy us for going while they have to stay. They find nothing wrong and we are still on time. In Frankfurt, we have to wait about three hours in a very limited space for so many people, don't even have access to lavatory. The usual treatment by Germans, no better than 1990 or any of the earlier years. Of course, the EU citizens go through a different checkpoint, they only show that they have passports, nobody's really checking, no wait, they just walk through.
The flight is long and boring. We watch "Notting hill" on and off. Much later I hear that the place is a black neighborhood, though you wouldn't say so by the movie. We can't even sit together, the older girls are a dozen rows in front of us.
We land at JFK at about 13:00... sorry, 1 PM. Our first meeting with the foreign culture is an Eddy Murphy who does extensive ballet to direct us through a zigzag labyrinth to our passport control. Ours takes forever, because we have to fill the form for each one of us. At the customs, we put our best blasé faces, considering this is the crown of our border crossing career. They just wave us through, totally uninterested in our luggage. We're behind the rest of our plane, these guys have dealt with the rush, they're already on the break before the next wave. The anticlimax is disappointing to a near insult.
Greg is waiting by the door, reading about half a kilo of NYT or WSJ (probably the latter). He welcomes us, and we go to the van he rented. Well, a cigarette (first one after 13 hours) first. The air faintly smells of sea, and is very humid. As if we stepped into a soup.
Takes us for a ride over Manhattan, paying toll every couple of miles. The controls in the van, luckily, show temperature in Celsius too. It's cool inside. The girls want to see statue of Liberty, and Greg manages to grab a spot to park at Battery Park. Lena doesn't want to leave the van, thinking it's too cold outside - if it's so cold inside.
We saw our first squirrel right there. Then a couple of thin black guys selling fake Rolexes out of their attache cases (which, the cases, I don't think I saw again - they seem to carry their papers in anything but). Then a blue statue sitting atop a park bench. Which is actually a black lady painted blue, unmoving. And we get to see the statue as well, through the haze.
He drives us to DC, with a stop at McDonalds somewhere along the way - we were hungry, last airborne meal was six hours ago. The first and the last time we went into a Mc. The menu is so complicated, just reading through it is enough to make me give up. I just say "anything that wouldn't ooze down my beard" and go to the toilet. Aka restroom (well we WERE tired, weren't we?). After Battery Park, this is the second cultural shock: so much room between pissoirs. The rooms are simply huge - and I've seen a bunch of toilets across Europe.
We make another stop somewhere, finding an open roadside mall. I buy a jeans jacket, reluctantly, because damn it next week I'll be able to choose. Greg just forks over the 20$-some. It seems we're his big social experiment. Or social engineering hobby. Well, I did have him in the same role in december.
At DC we meet with Pete, leave the van, repack into cars and drive to A-burg. I sit with Pete in his Saturn, which is a sports coupe, with plastic body. Last week I still drove the equally plastic trabant... and now I sit in another plastic job. At least he's a smoker, so a few more puffs in the car. Nasty static shock when you leave the car, though. It has the automatic seat belts - the doorside buckle slides, as soon as you close the door, around the doorframe and ends somewhere near door handle.
We are totally zombie the last few dozen miles. We get two rooms in the little hotel across the street from Zero. This day lasted 30 hours, and then some, of which we were awake for 27 hours. All that time I wore those shoes her uncle bought me nine years ago for that wedding. And wore them a few years more, when I didn't wear sandals.