Wicky Wild Wild...

In January, I made my triumphant¹ return to the States. I gave myself 3.5 weeks to savour it.

• 10 days in California (6 days in LA, 4 in Newport Beach)
• 7 days in New York
• 5 days in Boston

Being an avid fan of American television, I’d been entertaining thoughts of heading out West for a couple of years now. And as luck would have it, a friend of mine was living in Newport Beach in the OC. So it was two birds with one stone flight. New York was obvs/tots a must; one of my favourite TV shows² is filmed there aaaand I wanted to see a Broadway show, plus walk-in gymnastics classes! Boston was a natural port of call because being Irish, having connections in that city are as certain as Molly having a sassy comeback for anything I might have to say.³

Getting on the plane in Dublin, I was away in Lala-land and I ended up taking the wrong seat. The guy, whose place I usurped,⁴ was very easy going about it and we swapped designated seats. Considering I was seated beside an wailing child, whose mother did not buckle him in even when directly instructed to do so,⁵ I think he came away the better in trading places.⁶

As a result of the 5 hour stopover in NY, I flew⁷ was flown across the US of A after sun down. There was zero cloud cover, which meant I could see the lamp lit lanes and car headlights down below.⁸ Like a nervous system laid out. I thought it looked fantastic; lights twinkling across a dark expanse, the street lights steady and the car lights moving along in between.⁹

I flew into LA Burbank, and despite it being January, it was still mid-teens with no wind worth mentioning. I ended up getting a taxi to the hostel because the public transport system was too intimidating to consider after being awake 20 hours. Cars are cheap, LA roads so wide and locations dispersed out, that few people use the bus. The bus system is what I would technically call a shambles. The stop at Burbank didn’t have a timetable that I could see. A couple of days later in Hollywood, I did spy a tiny timetable that read: “Early morning and late night 2 times an hour, during the day 4 times an hour”… or something to that effect. What time of day this actually referred to and what time in the hour, who’s to say? Most of the locals I spoke to didn’t even know if there were buses that went from one place to another, at a push they would allow that it was possible.

I stayed at Hollywood Hostel because it was just off Hollywood Blvd, which I figured meant most of what I wanted to see was in walking distance. The lovely lady that handled my check-in was named Charisma… She very much lived up to that name on two levels. Firstly, very warm, welcoming and unbelievably genuine. Second of all, her name was Charisma for crying out loud! She was from California; she had that hippy/surfer’s Zen air about her.

Being checked in to a place with such a comfortable and positive Californian stereotype was a good way to start the trip and certainly helped me sleep easily that night. :)

To be continued…

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1. Ok – “triumphant” is a bit of a stretch…
2. Person of Interest (this one is up at the top alongside Breaking Bad, Sherlock [BBC version with Martin Freeman and Benedict Cumberbatch], Deadwood and Mad Men), which gets better and better; I’m actually getting a rush just thinking about how awesome it is; Humour, action set-pieces, witty repartee, strong leading men, lovely leading ladies, gold standard story development and, possibly most importantly, its oft tongue in cheek, but respectful homage to 80s action cinema.
3. Christmas 2011, she said something at dinner that I thought was too harsh, and I looked to Mummydearest and said “Now you are stuck with a daughter.” Molly noted the barbed comment, eyeballed me, and said rather menacinglyⁱ,”Ehhh, Máirtín… your friends in… Belgium [the syllables dripping in distaste] think that you are weird. [pauses for dramatic effect] Does that make you feel angry?”
4. Game of Thrones is back!
5. The disregard for the flight attendants instructions rankle more than the wailing. Certainly now on reflection.
6. I wonder how many pop culture references around New York I could fit in… I’ll try that in my New York post. Doing it here would just be “cray-cray”.
7. I wish I could fly...
8. I googled for information about the distribution of traffic volume during the day, specifically the difference in pattern between USA and Europe. I don’t recall noticing so much traffic when I flying over Europe at night. Given America’s “24/7” culture, it sounds reasonable to me that there would be more traffic at “off-peak” hours, because there is more likely to be someone getting off work at a given time. I called of the datahunt after 2 hours or so because I wasn't getting anywhere fast, and all I wanted was a by-the-way in a foot note.
9. 7 years ago, when I was in Florida, I had a couple of lectures on human physiology in aviation with a guy named Villiers. He also happened to be a flight instructor and told us that the semicircular canals in our ears can only track movement in two dimensions at a time. For the instrumentation exams that he oversaw, he would fly with them over the big farming states (e.g. Iowa) at night. At a certain point he would ask them to reach back behind the seat and get something out of a bag. When they did that, he flew them upside down. The twisting back and then looking down into the bag masked the sensation of being flipped. When the student turned back around, most had a very vitriolic response to the change – Screaming, freaking out, often threatening violence; the sky and ground were almost indistinguishable because the scattered lights of farmhouses between corn fields mirrored the starry sky, so there was a very strong sense of disorientation. The test was to see if they could use their instruments to right things again, and not "fly by the seat of their pants".

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i. Reminiscent of the malicious glee with which Mads Mikkelson plays Hannibal in the so named series