Asymmetric Flights

Getting out of the USA was quick and pleasant; I was at the airport an hour ahead of my flight and it wasn't a problem. One look at the grimly pulled mouth of the Alaskan Air representative assured me that me leaving only an hour to get back into the US was not funny at all. And she was right. As in Shannon airport in Ireland, the US has staked out is immigration and customs office in a foreign international airport, all the better to refuse you entry with, and that meant queues: queue to check in (small, I was late) and then another queue to let good ol' Uncle Sam take my good ol' fingerprints and then onto the next queue for immigration and then finally (just when I thought I was in the home run, and was about to start running because my plane was about to take off) the mother of all queues through the off-with-your-shoes-belt-and-laptop-in-a-separate-basket bit.

I made it back. Yeah. Always so much excitement and will-they-wont-they fun. And the silver lining was that I (on the waitlist) got put into the side of the plane that I didn't want to be on, but it turned out to be just the right one: the plane passed over the series of giant volcanoes which I'd previously blogged about from the ground level, stretching from southern Washington State all the way into Northern California. Then it flew right over the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco downtown before making a U-Turn to land over the crazy coloured salt fields in the south side of the Bay. It was a beautiful flight.

The sunset photo below was taken on the outward bound trip, the others from the return one:




So for the joy of asymmetry, here is my list of the most striking differences between the USA and Canada:

• Canadians are even more polite than Americans. They stop for you if you're jay-walking across a road.
  
• the public transport in Canada is both usable and used, although cars are only marginally smaller than America's hulking monsters
• coins for dollars, and attractive money
  

And here's what's the same:

• checkerboard street grids with exciting names like "5th Avenue" "Broadway" and "64th Street"
• Fast Food Nations
• quarters, nickles and dimes