It had taken us a good part of the day to leave but eventually we set out in search of the beach, Calvin on his BMX, me on a borrowed, banana-seated cruiser from the warehouse. We found mostly city. On a hill by a school we saw it sprawling, stretching on and on in every direction. L.A. is a city of cars and our cycling took place with difficulty: on earthquake-ruined sidewalks, or nervously pressed to the gutters on the roads.

It hadn’t take too much convincing to get Nick to join us in LA. A few stories of drunken Santas and a place to stay and he and Alex set off down the coast road from San Francisco, where we’d left them. While we were searching for the beach, following the sun vaguely southwest and asking frequent directions, he was leaving Alex in a hostel and heading to meet us at Venice Beach. Calvin and I eventually found the coast – an equally uninterrupted sprawl, only this of flat sand and ocean – and rode north to meet him. Finally on a bike path, we rode through flocks of roller-skaters, past markets and drum circles, basketball games and impromptu parties, just as the movies suggest. We found Nick on sunset, then sat down for over-priced beers and bad burgers at a cafe fronting the beach.

When we got back to the warehouse, a couple of the guys were setting up a bike polo court. We set up at the bar and watched, helping when asked. There was a professional bike polo game going on nearby. The players were due later that evening.

We walked to a shop nearby and bought booze. The warehouse settled into its usual nightly state of chaos. The bar was declared open, which happens when there’s booze enough for everyone, at which point, people are permitted to smoke inside to avoid the social breaks going outside would cause. Bike polo games started up in the court and the night descended into drinking and bike polo and card games and conversation.

The next day, the three of us I drove around to all the places Nick had heard about in rap songs. We drove through Inglewood, down Crenshaw Blvd, through Compton, then down to Long Beach. It all just looked like more city to me. Not even interesting city. Just sprawl. Fast food joints, mechanics’ garages, supermarkets. I couldn’t see much worth writing rap songs about, but I guess you’ve gotta work with what you’re given.

We got lost a bunch of times. Got to Hollywood on dark. Drove down Sunset Blvd, through the Hollywood hills. It was all just street light, headlights, tails lights and more sprawl. Complicated collections of highways and exits. Suburbia just beyond. In the end, we drove for hours, the city another repetition of all the others.

Back at the warehouse, Calvin and Nick played bike polo in the left-over court while I watched the game of bridge going on at the bar. On of the players was the one who slept under the desk on the landing. He had great dreadlocks and I told him so. I usually don’t like dreadlocks but these were tight and thin, black and tidy. They looked good on him.
“Want one?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said, mostly joking.
“Pick one.”
“Um. Ok.”
“Grab a hold of it.”
“I could go get some scissors or something.”
“Nah. Just grab hold of it.”
I did as I was told. Slowly, he pulled his head away from my hand I felt the vibrations of the chosen dreadlock being ripped from his scalp like a weed from dry soil.
“A souvenir,” he announced, re-shuffling the cards.
“Thanks,” I said.

After a while, Calvin, Nick and I went for more beer. After so much time in the car, I insisted on walking.
“We should drive,” Nick said.
“Nah man, it’s not far. Let’s just walk.” We were going to a different place, hoping to find a better selection of beers than what the little corner shop nearby had to offer.
“Really. Let’s just drive,” he said.
“C’mon dude. We’ve been driving all day.”
Eventually, reluctantly, he agreed. I though he was just being lazy, but as we got deeper into the neighbourhood, I began to realise why he had been so insistent. It took me a while though.
“Man, all the food places are closed,” I said as we neared the supermarket. I had left my watch at the warehouse. “They close pretty early, hey.”
“It’s not really early,” Nick said.
“What time is it?”
Nick checked his phone. “10:30.”
“Shit,” I said. “Really? When did that happen?”
Most places were closed. What few people there were left on the streets watched us go by. Car slid past slowly. Nick didn’t say anything, just gave a quick nod.
“Fuck, I didn’t realise. If I had known how late it was…” I said.
“This isn’t exactly a good neighbourhood,” Nick said.
We went quiet.
“We should have driven,” I said.
“Yeah.”

The walk back was nervous and quiet and quick. Suddenly the streets seemed very dark and very deserted. I became very aware of my wallet.
Finally, we got back to the warehouse. The entrance is down an alleyway, and there’s a gate to get back in, which requires an electronic clicker to get through. We were just pulling it out, when a figure appeared from the shadows.
“Give me your fucking wallets,” he said, low and serious.
We froze. I immediately started to panic.
Then the figure started to laugh.“You guys got a clicker?” he said. “I left mine inside.”

“Fuck, did you guys fucking brew your own or something?” one of the girls asked when we finally walked in, and everyone laughed.

I didn’t want to go to LA. My plan, vague as it was, mainly involved three things: getting to Mexico by Christmas, sticking as close to the coast as possible, and avoiding Los Angeles like the plague. But here I was, Calvin in the passenger seat, a strange, surly girl from Phoenix in the back, on our way into LA.

From San Francisco, we had hugged the coast down Highway 1, my little Volkswagon taking those Hollywood turns like a sports car. Or, almost anyway. At one point, there was a roadblock, one lane of traffic blocked off and road workers with stop signs, enough of a wait for people to start getting out of their cars to stretch their legs or take pictures of the view. When we were finally allowed to crawl past, it wasn’t an accident or torn up asphalt causing the delay, but a full film crew and a movie set.

When we hit Malibu, just North of the city limits, Calvin started recognising settings from BMX videos he had watched. Soon after that, it was all city. We had left Santa Barbara early to ensure we would hit LA in between rush hours, but it’s always rush hour in LA, so the process of penetrating in was long, though easier than I was expecting.

We were going to a warehouse run by a bike collective called the Los Angelopes. It was in Inglewood, a suburb that I later learned from Nick features heavily in rap songs. Calvin knew the people there through a friend of a friend, who had met one of the people involved through a rideshare, and then had stayed there while bike touring through. Or something like that anyway.

The Los Angelopes build what they call freak-bikes, or tall bikes. Mostly these are frames welded on top of other frames with chains, brackets and brakes modified accordingly. They are mounted by the rider in a similar way to penny farthings, with a run-up and a jump, and look pretty precarious to ride.

A freak bike

The people involved in the collective organise or participate in events and rides, throw or crash parties, play bike polo, make videos for YouTube, dress up in all sorts of costumes, and generally cause trouble. Their warehouse contains an extensive workshop with every tool you could ever need and a full welding set-up. There’s a sound-proof recording studio in one corner of the warehouse, a boat out the back, great piles of milk crates, a bar, and enough bikes and bits of bikes to furnish a medium-sized town. Plus, one of the bathrooms has a black light in it, so at night your pee glows fluorescent in the bowl.

Apparently, the warehouse had originally been built as a ball bearing factory for World War II. The guy who currently owns it – who’s a bit odd by most accounts – bought it with the dream of turning it into a boxing brothel. The idea involved having a boxing ring set up in the main warehouse section where the girls would have boxing matches, while the men decided on which one they wanted and would later take them upstairs to a room.

His dream never came true. Instead, he gave up half-way through the renovations and leased it to a bicycle collective called the Los Angelopes, who now have pretty much free reign over the place. There are ten or more of them living throughout the half-built rooms of the first and second stories. One guy sleeps under a desk on the landing. Another lives in a tiny room under the stairs. And then there’s the constant revolving cast of couch-surfers and friends of friends who sleep where-ever they can find a warmish space to lay their sleeping bag.

We arrived sometime around late afternoon, and most people were out. We unpacked, made some food, tentatively explored and talked to one of the guys about his wheatgrass collection. We settled in. Then, a little after dark, without warning, the place was suddenly descended upon by eight or nine very drunk Santas.

They flooded in, all dishevelled red and white, slurring and yelling. Before long they had all crowded into one of the downstairs bedrooms with a bong and a kitten and had started playing Beatles records as loud as they would go, singing along as loud as they could sing.

They had been at a Santa pub crawl all day, someone explained to us. They had started out sometime in the early afternoon, in two groups, one at either end of the train line. Then they had bar-hopped their way down, eventually converging in one loud, drunken, red and white mess somewhere around the centre of the line.

Soon, everyone was sitting at the bar, continuing to drink heavily. To one side of me, a Santa started lighting aerosol cans on fire. Over in the workshop, a girl in fishnets and welded something together. Somewhere else, a couple more Santas hurled throwing knives at a target on the wall. At one point, I lifted my bottle to my lips just as two wrestling Santas tumbled off the table and into my face, which was probably the best way I have every managed to get a bloody lip.

Then we were climbing into a car driven by one of the Santas, who was reasonably sober now, to crash someone’s work party in another part of town. It was more of a formal affair than we were expecting. Apart from us and the Santas, everyone was fairly well dressed. There was an open bar with three kegs of beer and all the spirits and mixers you could want. There we

Where we slept

re great mountains of pizzas on a table. There was a helium-filled, remote control, floating shark, which Calvin and both I got to have a go at steering.

Then we were back in the car and heading back to the warehouse. There, exhausted, Calvin, the girl from Phoenix and I all collapsed into our sleeping bags on the balcony overlooking the warehouse, which happened to be missing most of the railing that would otherwise have protected us from the drop to the concrete floor of the warehouse below. It was probably around 3 or 4am. The next morning, at 9am, we were awoken by singing.

Driving through America was like driving through fiction. All the names I had heard in movies and on TV shows, all the culture that had saturated mine, and here I was at the source, driving down the Oregon Coast, crossing the border into California, hitting highway 1, travelling through Big Sur and then into San Francisco, Roger’s poor transmission struggling up all those hills.

There’s so often such a big gap between the image you hold in your head of a place before you’ve been there – the  place as you expect it to be – and reality. Most of the time, these imagined places are eclipsed once you go and experience the real thing. I remember Prague being very different to how I expected it to be, but I don’t remember how. Same with Borneo, Berlin, Vietnam, Barcelona, the Balkans: most of the places I’ve been to. In my seven-year-old Canadian head, Australia was a very different place to what it turned out to be when we moved there. And I don’t remember how it was I pictured them before, but it seems to me that they are places all of their own: imaginary but somehow substantial. I wish sometimes that I could compile these places – these imagined lands -   preserve them somehow.

I expected the US to be a monster. I expected it to be big, gluttonous, ignorant, racist. I expected most Americans to be kinda stupid, and annoying, and probably rude. I was expected them to be fat and unhealthy and all of their food to be fried or sugary. In short, I was expecting to be disgusted by the States: by it’s grotesque commercialism, consumption and waste, by its insulation and self-absorption. I knew that there were good people too: the people’s whose books I had read or movies I had enjoyed, whose opinions and knowledge I’d read in magazines, but I wasn’t expecting these people to be in the majority.

I was right about one thing. It’s really big. It’s too big, in fact, for any single, accurate impression, except perhaps one of the sheer size of it. This was my first impression, and I was expecting my second to be desperation. But actually, despite all the broken systems, the crumbling economy and the the various wars on things we see form the outside, things are pretty calm in there. Business as usual.

In fact, culturally, it seems that American is pretty much Australia but bigger. Or Australia is pretty much America but smaller, with the main differences between the two countries mostly stemming out of this difference in size. Well,  the small part I drove through, anyway. Though I only really drove through 3 out of 52, each state of America seems to function culturally almost as different countries. There are different accents and different political slants, variations in laws and attitudes. So I’m sure there are the fat, rude, ignorant people out there somewhere. They just didn’t really hang out in the places I went to.

Nope, I just kept meeting interesting, intelligent, good, friendly people. For all the times I got lost – and there were many – there was some friendly soul to help me find where I was going. Most of the people I met had a sense of humour. Most I wanted to talk to. Geographically, the country was stunning, the coastline and landscape constantly changing, most of it well maintained. Not much to see on the interstates, but the coast roads sure did make for some fun driving.

Already, that imagined, expected United States has pretty much dissolved. Or at least the part that applied to Washington State, Oregon and California. All good places, by the way.

(These photos by Nick Lynch)

It’s after dark by the time we hit the coast. In Tillamook, we pull into a supermarket carpark for supplies and a look at the map.
“There’s this little town down here where we could stop,” I suggest, pointing at a little dot by the ocean labelled Pacific City. “It’s on the beach. We can wake up by the ocean.”
“And the road from here looks pretty inland,” Calvin says. “So we won’t be missing much, driving there in the dark.”
Nick shrugs. “Sure.”

We buy bread and beer, tomatoes and cheese. The supermarket is as big as Bunnings. You can’t even see the end of it – it’s as if it’s been swallowed up by the curvature of the earth. I buy a jar of pickles as big as my head. It will pretty much be gone by morning.

Nick leads the way, his ’85 Landcruiser sounding its diesel grumble out of the carpark. A little ways down the road, the ocean appears at my window. I glance over at it.
“Hey Calvin…” I say.
“Mmmm?”
“Shouldn’t the ocean be on the left?”
“Um,” he says.”
“Because, if we’re heading South…”
“Yup.”
“…the ocean should be on the right.”
We go quiet for a minute, my headlights bouncing on and off of Nick’s license plate.
“There’s a big bay,” he says. “I think that’s the bay.”
“Ok.”
“So. Maybe it’s ok that the ocean’s on the wrong side.”
“Ok,” I say.

It’s Nick who finally pulls over. We roll up next to him and wind down the window.
“The ocean…”
“Yup.
I get out and walk up to a house for directions.

Pacific City consists of a service station, a short string of motels, and a small scattering of shops. After checking in, the man at the reception produces a map from behind the counter and gives Nick and me a quick tour of town.
“That’s it,” he says, after a few minutes. We’ve taken the particular notice of the local pub, now circled in red. There’s a diner for breakfast and a big rock off the beach called Haystack Rock. “Now, in the morning you’ve gotta go the Grateful Bread,” he says pointing to the little square indicating the bakery. “Diane, I tell ya, she makes the most amazing scones. Wow. I tell ya. Those scones are to die for, boy.”

Within minutes our motel room is cluttered with the contents of our cars. We make sandwiches on the top of the microwave, sawing the tomatoes apart with my Leatherman and cracking the beers open with lighters.
“You guys are going to thank me for these,” Nick says, pulling out some paper plates. “Shit. These are going to come in really fucking handy.”

One by one we are fed and showered and ready, a few beers down already. We all grab travellers for the walk, but there’s a cop car outside the pub, lights bouncing blue and red off the low windows, so, after some hesitation, we stash our beers in the bushes before walking the rest of the distance to the door.

Inside, the place is full of activity. Friday night in Pacific City. The atmosphere is that of a neighbourhood Christmas party. The barmaids walk around in tank tops and call all the old men slouched on the bar stools by name, a few people play pool. Christmas decorations litter the walls in clumps. Behind them hang deer heads and record covers, basketball hoops and names of beers in flashing neon letters.

When we walk in, it’s not exactly the silence of a Western saloon when a stranger walks in, but several people do stop what they’re doing to look us up and down.  Nick, Calvin and I make a beeline for the bar to order a pitcher of beer and four glasses.

Alex goes to find us a table. On his way to one near the woodheater, he’s stopped by a drunken old man on a computer chair. Calvin, Nick and I catch up mid-conversation. The man has some of the worst teeth I’ve ever seen but he grins like they’re beautiful, his bottom jaw fitting in over his top at the end of every sentence like a messy Halloween display. He wants to buy us our beer because we’re foreign. He loves Alex’s British accent and keeps getting him to repeat things.

“I love meeting people from different places, you know.” He grins, looks around at us. “I love hearing about other places.” He grins again. The effect is like one of those battery powered decorations with moving parts. “You know, I’ve never been out of the States. Never been out of here. But I’ve always wanted to travel. You know, it’s been my dream to travel. It really has. I love hearing about other places in the world. Love meeting people from different places.”

Unknowingly, we’ve ordered one of the more expensive beers and when the barmaid comes over with our pitcher, he hesitates at the price.
“Double-it-up,” he declares after a pause. Over our protests selects a hundred from the thick wad of them in his wallet. The barmaid reappears a few minutes later with another pitcher.

Despite professing his desire to hear about people from other places, he does most of the talking. The pitchers were mainly to keep us there. There’s something about an ex-wife and a son, about her slandering his name, about how bad that is in a small town.
“So, which of these men are yours?” he asks me. I tell him none of them and later there is a marriage proposal for citizenship. Then there are a few more, each becoming more serious with each passing drink.

The pitchers empty. We get drunker. Nick goes over for another. The barmaid comes over and speaks to the man sternly, warns him not to get like last time, and she is like a daughter to her dottering old dad. We buy him a new whiskey and coke. Other old men join us at the table. I sit there struggling to preserve this moment, here in some small bar in some small town, somewhere on the west coast of America, drinking away our Friday night in the company of old strangers.

There is a video on my camera from later in the night. It is of the three boys, cluttered around one of the beds in our small hotel room. Calvin, leaning against the wall, plays his little green ukulele. Nick sits on the room slapping on his legs and singing. Alex, on his knees beside the bed, bashes in time on a beer box. After a few seconds, Nick turns to Calvin and asks him to show his something on the uke. To their left, Alex keeps bashing absently on the box, though there is nothing left to keep time to. I hit stop on the recording, put down the camera, go and join them.

I could live in Portland. Easy. I like the place immediately, without even knowing why. I like it despite the brow-level cloud cover, the sprawling semi-industrial areas of the East Side, the damp  cold that goes right through you. There’s just something about it that makes me happy.

Portland is day three in the United States of America, Seattle is the evening of day one and the morning of day two. After checking into a hostel, I meet a potential ride-sharer for a drink. But he is dreadlocked and dour, gruff and a little on edge, and I can’t see myself sharing a confined space with him for any sort of extended period. So, the next morning, on the ferry across the Puget Sound, I send him a message explaining that I want to do this part of the trip on my own. I never hear back from him.

The car to myself, I drive off the ferry and towards north Washington, near the Olympic Mountains. After several sets of directions from several service station attendants and one group of firemen, I find the house I’m looking for: one of four or five places lining an airstrip somewhere outside of Sequim where some friends of Jeanne, Brian and Glen’s live. Both retired, he’s building an airplane in the hanger in the front yard, and she weaves intricate tapestries on looms in the guest room.

They are deeply intelligent both, wise and well travelled and conversation comes easily. We talk a lot about America and they explain some particulars of American politics and culture that can’t really be properly understood from a distance. I tell them I fell like I know a lot about the U.S., even though I have never been here before. I know that Portland is in Oregon because I’ve heard the two names run together on TV or in movies. I have a clear visual image of what San Francisco and L.A. must be like. I know more about the political landscape and cultural nuances of the U.S. than of any other country I have never visited, because every aspect of it has been fictionally presented to me in every medium it can find to be presented in. And because it has all been so well emulated in so many aspects of my own culture. I tell them that, most of all, I’m pretty curious to find out what it’s really like here.

The next morning I find the 101 and follow it all the way to Portland, buying coffee that tastes quite a bit like burnt popcorn at a casino cafeteria not far out of Sequim, and stopping to buy a homemade postcard at a little shop on the Hood Canal. In the postcard, the shop is pictured covered in snow.

The day after arriving, I go for a long walk from the north east of the city back to the south. Portland is divided into four quarters. East of the river is inhabited mostly by students, hippies and hipsters, little stores and bars; the west houses the yuppies and the well off, the main downtown area and a massive park on a hill that spans half the length of the city. I spend most of my time in the east, which turns out to be a good decision. There, the suburbs come in rambling weatherboard, all lilac purples and sky blues, every shades of green and red and brown, all of them similar but each somehow different to its neighbour. There are bike lanes full of bikes and streets full people who smile unprompted at strangers. I find a three-story fittings and lighting store called Hippo Hardware and spend nearly an hour there. The inside is a labyrinth of ramps and little rooms, passageways and basements. There’s a hinge room and a door room, a wall of keyholes, a whole herd of clawed bathtubs. The top story is so crowded with different lamps and light fixtures it’s hard to move around without bumping something over.

On the second day, I arrange to meet Calvin at a cafe in the north east. His reply to my ridesharing ad has told me he was 25, outgoing, heading to San Francisco to hang out with his Aunt. He’s travelling with a BMX bike that can be stowed like a suitcase and a backpack and  he promised that he can properly operate Roger, my car. That he had called my car by name in his reply won him major points.

When he arrives, I like him as immediately as the city he’s been living in the past eight months or so. He’s scruffy and dishevelled, with thin, unbrushed hair that, once freed from his beanie, stands up at all angles from his head. He wears great big gold-framed grampa glasses that are too big for his face but somehow suit him. A fine network of small white scars, which I later find out are from various BMXing accidents, decorate his forehead and  nose. He sits down and we start talking and suddenly two hours has passed, our coffee cups emptied and cleared, and the conversation has barely rested.

The next day is sunny for the first time. I rent a bike from the hostel and go for a long ride, posting up ridesharing ads in the hostel on the west side and exploring the downtown. I find the giant park and casually start riding up into it and then just keep going, expecting any moment for the hills to plateau out into a coffee shop or something and being disappointed at very regular intervals. In the distance, Mount Helen rises in a perfect white triangle from the flat of the surrounds.

At the top, with no reason not to, I go to the zoo. I wander around happily in the cold, seeking out the heated indoor exhibits, giggling at the animals’ facial expressions and reading all the signs about how we’ve fucked up pretty much everyone there’s ecosystem and killed off most of their relatives.

Nick I meet at the hostel. Sitting on the sofa by the reception desk when he checks in, I overhear him say something about driving south.
“Hey,” I say, getting up from the sofa and walking over.
“Hey,” he says.
“You’re driving south? Because I’m driving south.”
He looks at me.
“But you’ve got a car,” I continue, feeling myself start to blabber. “I’m looking for rideshare people but if you’ve got a car, that won’t work. Anyway. Yeah. When were you thinking of leaving?”
He shrugs. “A day or so.”
Everything about him is loose. He’s quite tall and stands straight, but his posture is comfortably slack and rounded. He swings in his movements, his limbs rising and falling with loose intention. The conversation moves forward easily.
“Maybe we could convoy it or something?” I suggest, after we’ve been talking in the reception area for a good 20 minutes.
He shrugs. “Yeah. Maybe.”

Later, we meet Calvin for a beer to talk about the trip. We take my car and drive to where he is, which turns out to be so far north it’s not even east any more. We get predictably lost with my bad directions, but make it in the end, and the three of us start in hungrily on the $2 pints of PVR, pore happily over maps, and make plans. Later, Nick and I find some live music in a venue closer to our hostel. The first band, playing when we arrive, is good and messy and fun – all fluoro colours and funny sunglasses – but the second just sort of bashes at their drum kits and laptops and makes animal noises. I watch a girl on the lower level of the bar play with a glowstick inside a balloon for nearly half-an-hour.

The next morning, I pick up Calvin and we drive downtown to meet Nick. He’s sitting in a cafe with a British backpacker named Alex, who had occupied the bunk above him at his previous hostel in the west side of the city. They had struck up conversation at 2am one morning after being woken up by a few bad dorm mates and from there had organised the rideshare. Calvin and I sit down. The day is creeping its way towards noon but we are four now, nearly ready to go, fortifying our young bodies with breakfast and bad coffee, periodically feeding our respective parking metres, until it’s eventually time to climb into our very own cars and strike out freely, happily towards the coast.

Seems like everyone who’s crossed it has an U.S. border story. In Seattle, there was a whole hostel pubcrawl worth of us, each with our own special rendition when the topic came up.

As with most, my border crossing didn’t go well. I crossed at Vancouver, driving South on the I5 towards Seattle. When we pulled up, the loud American traveller I had picked up from a ridesharing website was eating an apple and laughing at how nervous I was.

“It’s fine!” she kept saying. “God, you’re so funny how scared you are. Just relax! It’ll totally be fine!”

The car in front of us finally pulled away to drive merrily into America and we pulled forward. The man in the booth looked down at us as sternly as he could. We passed over our passports – her battered American, my Canadian. He looked at mine for a long time.

“What do you do?” he asked me.
“Sorry?”
“What do you do? For work.” He gave me a hard look.
“Uh, I’m a writer,” I said, deciding that it sounded better than post-student or out-of-work bartender.
“Will you be writing in the States?”
“Yeah, probably,” I said. He gave me another one of his looks and I realised my mistake. “Uh, I mean, not professionally. Not for money or anything.”
“Because, you can’t write in the States. You know that.”
I nodded as earnestly as I could. He looked at me for a moment longer, before slowly passing his gaze over my car.
“That an apple?” he asked my companion.
“Uh-ha,” she said.
“Got any more of those?”
We shook our heads.
“Right,” he said and pulled out a pen. He started filling out a yellow form. “Ok, I’m going to need you to pull over the side there for a car search. So, pull in on the left over here. Park your car and give them this slip.” He handed me the yellow piece of paper with our passports. I took them, panicking quietly to myself as I put the car in drive.
“It’s totally fine!” my traveller assured me. “Relax!”

I parked, found the apple I had in the back seat, and started rushing through it as casually as possible on the walk towards the giant, white, bureaucratic border building. The American deposited her apple core in a flower pot at the entrance.

Inside, the U.S. border guard at the counter looked exactly like a U.S. border guard. Buzzcut, overweight and stony-faced, he was not impressed by the apple I was trying so desperately to finish.
“Uh, do you have a bin or something?” I asked.
“Hey Anne? Anne, can you get Mike over here? This girl’s got an apple here I’m going to need him to have a look at.” Anne left to go get Mike. “Got any more of those?” he asked me.
“No,” I said. “No. I’m pretty sure.”

He stared on the questions. He was a man who liked people to stay where they were, it seemed; people who just stayed put and simple.
“So, you’re one of those people, huh?” he said to my companion after she had finished telling him about how she had been teaching in Thailand and wandering around South East Asia for the past several years. “You just travel around like that? Just go from place to place all the time?”
She nodded.
“But how do you support youself?” he asked angrily. “How do you get the money to do that?”
She told him she worked for it. She taught.

Mike was taking his time with the apple, so we kept talking. I don’t remember how we got onto Germany but a dull light came on behind his eyes when we did. He had been stationed there, he told us, once right before and once right after the wall came down. He knew all about those attitudes over there, all about the people who had them. He lightened up a bit after that, after we talked about his military days for a while. Finally, he and mike pulled on some gloves, told us to take a seat, and marched out to my car.

“My Australian passport is sitting right on the centre console,” I said, watching them pass through the sliding doors.
“So?”
“I dunno. Just might complicate things,” I said. “I just want to go through. I wonder if I have any other fruit.”

When they returned, Mike was carrying the slightly demented apple I had pulled from Jeanne, Brian and Glen’s tree before leaving Victoria and forgotten about. They called us back up to the counter.
“Sorry about the apple,” I said. “I completely forgot about it.”
The border guard waved it off. “OK, so you’re fine to go through,” he said to my companion. “You’re just an American citizen returning home.” He turned to me. “You, however…” My stomach dropped. “You’re a writer. Now, you might think it’s fine to pick up a writing job here and there in the States. It’s not. You can’t write while you’re in the states.”
I nodded dumbly. “No worries.”
“Alright. So you’re OK to go through.”

On the other side, we stopped at the service station a little down the road to use the toilet. The American traveller bought me a small bottle of cider to celebrate my first time entering United States of America. At the counter, the lady was friendly and talkative.
“This is your first time in the U.S.?” she asked, amazed.
I nodded.
“Well then. Welcome! How was your first experience here?” she asked, indicating towards the restroom.
“Fine,” I said. “Just fine. Much nicer than the border.”
“Well, I’m glad. I haven’t been in there for a little while. It gets so messy sometimes, I tell you. The Orientals – they’re the worst.” She shook her head. “I tell you, they just go ahead and pee all over the place. Terrible. Just all over the seat and everything.”

Round the corner and police lights. Roadblock. Shit.

“Hi. Saanich Police Counter Attack.”
“Uh, sorry?”
“Saanich Police Counter Attack.”
“Oh. Ok. Hi.”
“Where are you travelling from this evening?”
“Uh, my uncle’s house. Just… around the corner. Back there.”
“And have you had anything to drink this evening?”
“No.”
“No?”
“No. Nothing.”
“Alrighty. Thank you. Have a good evening.”
“What? Oh. Ok. Thanks. Um, yeah. You too.”

Canadian police: giving their motorists the benefit of the doubt.

About a year and a half ago, I wrote a post about learning to speak Czech. I had tried to learn a little before leaving Australia, diligently listening and re-listening to all ten units of Pimsleur’s Speak and Read Essential Compact Czech, obediently repeating the phrases as I was told to, doing my best to get the accent and pronunciation right, memorising as much as I possibly could. Then, I flew to Prague.

Unfortunately, the conversations the tapes were teaching me usually went something like this:

Woman: Excuse me, do you speak English?
Man: No.
Woman (pointing at a building): What is that?
Man: This is the national theatre.
Woman: Thank you.

Or, this:

Man: Good day.
Woman: Good day.
Man: Excuse me please, is this a post office?
Woman: No, this is not a post office. This is a restaurant.
Man: Tell me please, where is the post office?
Woman: The post office is over there.
Man: Okay. Thank you.

When I got to the Czech Republic, I found that not many conversations actually proceeded this way.

“Good Day,” I would say to the people in the shops.
“Good Day,” they would reply, before saying something dense and complicated in rapid Czech.
“Uhh…” I would say.

This made it difficult when what I really wanted to communicate was something like: “Do you have baking soda? I want to make some banana bread, you see, and I don’t know if there is any such thing as baking soda in the Czech Republic. And even if there was, I don’t know what would be written on the label because everything’s in Czech, and they didn’t really prepare me for things like needing baking soda on my Czech tapes…”

Or, when I went to the doctor’s, something like: “So I’ve got asthma – everyone’s got asthma in Australia. But, see, I’ve had this really bad cough since I got here, and it’s probably the cold weather and everything – my lungs aren’t really being used to negative 14 – but it doesn’t seem to be going away and I’d like to avoid antibiotics if that’s possible. So I was hoping maybe you could help me out?”

So I was just sick for a long time instead.

What the Czech tapes got right, though, and what I didn’t even realise they were preparing me for, were some particulars of Czech culture. Czech Language Tape Land is a strange, desolate place, where people often say “No” to each other or cut off conversations prematurely. People are constantly asking for directions to restaurants but I don’t think they ever actually eat anything, or even ever sit down. They just kind of stand around in the cold, pointing at monuments and asking what things are, formally introducing themselves and their colleagues, telling each other they speak Czech well. Everyone says goodbye a lot. “Goodbye,” one person will say with a sigh. Short pause. “Goodbye,” the other person will say.

Admittedly, this wasn’t an entirely accurate representation of what Czech people were like, but after being there for a while I was able to draw some pretty funny parallels.

Anyway, I’ll be road-tripping my way down to Mexico in a few weeks, so now I’m learning Spanish. The internet has generously provided me with three levels of thirty units each of Pimsleur’s Speak and Read Essential Spanish, which is about 45 hours of Spanish lessons. I try to complete at least one unit every day – two on weekends – often in the car driving to and from work. They specifically request you don’t complete the reading section of the units while driving, so I do that bit at home.

On the surface, they are quite similar in content to the Czech tapes. “Excuse me,” I say in Spanish to the traffic. “Where is the restaurant?” Or, “Good evening. It is nice to meet you. I am Mr. Jones. I am from North America.”

In Spanish Language Tape Land, however, they definitely eat. They tell each other they want to eat, and then they  go off somewhere to eat, and then they change their minds and decide they want to drink instead, so they go to order beer and then complain about the price. They are constantly pooling their money and then spending what little they have in restaurants and bars, asking the other people around them how many pesos or dollars they might have. The Spanish speakers are over-friendly to the North Americans, who then get all uncomfortable and tell them they don’t understand Spanish. The men flirt with the women and the women cleverly and snidely rebut the men. My favourite conversation so far, has been this one:

Man: Miss, where is the Bolivar Hotel?”
Woman: It’s down there, sir.
Man: And the Restaurant Columbus?”
Woman: It’s here.
Man: Thank you miss. I am Mr. Jones.
Woman: Glad to meet you, sir.
Man: And you. Are you Miss Gomez?
Woman: No sir. I’m not Miss Gomez. I’m Mrs. Gomez. Goodbye sir.
Man: Goodbye Mrs. Gomez.

I’m very much looking forward to going to Mexico.

Anyway, people have been hinting that I should probably write some more bloody posts, so I’ll see what I can come up with. Until then, a diversion: here’s my friend James’ blog, who is currently riding his bicycle across South-East Asia, like the crazy man he is.

Speak soon.