Arthegarn's Soap Opera II - In America Date Thursday, April 25, 2024 - 02:34 PM PST Topic Experiences I have tried to compress my first visit to the U.S. as much as possible but there are so many things to talk about… The War of Iraq. Everywhere. I got a window seat in the Madrid-Atlanta flight but before I know I have this man sitting next to me who felt like talking and whose first question was if I was a priest and why did I dress all in Black. Immediately after that the guy started telling me about how well Aznar was doing things and thanking me (?) about Spain’s support on the War of Iraq. After the first hour of polite chat (I can’t avoid being polite) I started wondering if this was some sort of ethilic delusion. By the time we were over Chesapeake Bay (I knew the place because that’s where Jack Ryan lives) I was certain I had fallen asleep and it was all a nightmare. Atlanta. . It’s actually pronounced ah-LAHN-ah. The first times I heard the word I thought they were talking about a Dragonlance character. That Airport is HUGE. Most impressive. And clean. Politeness. . Everyone is extremely polite in the U.S. “Welcome to the United States of America, Sir”, “Yes, Sir”, “No, Sir”, “Right over there, Sir”, “Thank you, Sir”. I felt like in a Star Trek episode. Spanish. . Everyone speaks Spanish (more like they speak Mexican, but anyway…). In El Paso I spoke barely 5% of the time in English, that was to be expected, but I didn’t expect the customs and the immigration officers in Ah-lahn-ah to try to speak to me in Spanish and actually manage to do it pretty well. I remember in the Federal Courthouse at El Paso, everyone was speaking in Spanish: lawyers, the U.S. attorney, the accused, the bailiff… Then the judge came in and everything switched to English for the procedure, and after that they reverted immediately to Spanish. English. . Many people speak an awful English and I don’t mean just their pronunciation. Many of the High School kids I met couldn’t write properly. The Military. . They are everywhere. Building construction. . I am the son of a Civil Engineer and some things stick. Most family houses I saw at El Paso are built of little more than spit and mud. Even the rich (hem!) people live in houses with poor structural integrity and poor materials. Cars. . Everyone has a car. Not every family, every damn member of it. Some people had even several cars, all of them brand-new, all of them large. I saw more jeep-style cars in El Paso than in my entire life. And all of them with low-efficiency engines compared to European standards, drinking gallons of poorly refined fuel. I actually got to see that the Sunday car-cleaning ritual is true. Weapons. . That is the most culturally shocking thing of all, going to a High School and watching a big “No firearms allowed” sign. And in restaurants, bars, buses… Just like as if people just wandered around with their guns! I didn’t get to see any civilian with a weapon, though. American History. . It’s like as if every corner of the U.S. had a plaque of some sort remembering that Martin Luther King once spent a night in this motel, or that this was the house of General Whoever or those who gave up their lives in service of their country and attended this School or worked in this factory or whatever. Don’t misunderstand me, I don’t think that’s bad, I just find it shocking. School and School level. . That “No Child Left Behind” thing is very noble and completely misguided, in my humble opinion. At High School I saw pretty smart kids bored to death instead of learning and pretty dumb ones that just couldn’t (or wouldn’t) understand the lessons. And the methods! It’s amazing Texan children learn anything at all! OK, maybe I am used to my teachers and subjects being more demanding, but I still think High Schools are an Infantocracy. Kids do almost what they want without an apparent discipline! Sizes. . Everything is big. Cars, restaurants, dishes in the restaurants (I remember going to a Thai and ordering a ginger chicken that two people couldn’t have eaten), streets, motorways, houses, buildings, monuments, malls, parks... Even burgers are bigger! Roads. In El Paso, highways are amazing, while streets in the city are plain awful. So curious. Culture. . I mean general knowledge, here. I can’t measure it when it comes to the States but whenever the subject is outside their borders or more than 250 years in the past it all gets blurry. I heard Caesar being mixed with Alexander, about the Pyramid of Ramesees and about Chile being a City in Colombia. Money. . There is lots of it. Loads of it. It’s amazing how much money is there in the United States. You can feel it. During my visit to El Paso I went to the Federal Courthouse. I wanted to see how justice was done in the U.S. I was amazed at the means at the disposal of judges and justice professionals. Amazing. Instead of the usual cramped tables there were neat ones with digital records. Everything was so clean, so correct, so orderly… Everyone had an office, Unitedstatesians working in Spanish courthouses would die of asphyxiation if they didn’t die of claustrophobia before. I got introduced to several federal judges (who spoke to me in Spanish, even though some of them came from obvious long-term WASP families) and found them to be amazingly educated people, specially compared to the average Texan I was meeting (lawyers were just fine, but they were all bloody wealthy compared to my usual standards). There I saw some really pretty things and I fell in love with Unitedstatesian practise of the law. There was a Mexican charged with border-crossing. His lawyer would tell about his sad story, how he crossed the border so her little girl could undergo surgery in a life-or-death situation and how she had actually died in the hospital and her father had given himself up to the police as soon as the girl was in surgery. The judge interrogated him and since the man had a problem answering through the interpreter he asked him directly, in Spanish. In the end he became convinced and just let the man go with almost no time in prison. Beautiful. I also saw some other things. For instance there was this guy who wanted to plead guilty and the judge wouldn’t allow it because of a technical subtlety. I saw the judge and the lawyer argue for almost twenty minutes before they could understand each other. I had understood almost immediately, and the fact is that neither the judge nor the lawyer knew that the subtlety had a name (dolus eventualis). I parted with the impression that lawyers don’t know much about Science of the Law. This is taking forever, I know. I’ll stop here and I haven’t even talked about nerds, High School movies being right, sex, alcohol, my visit to Ciudad Juárez and the unimaginable contrast when you cross the Rio Grande, obesity,… I haven’t talked about American Goths! I’ll just say that I was there for ten days and on these ten days I got to met Fridaluna (who came to pick me up with a dozen roses – first and only time a woman has ever bought me roses) She was nice, friendly, sweet and madly in love with me, though she tried to poison me the first morning by taking me to Mexico and having me eat tamales. I got to meet her brother and her friends and that I wept like a child when we parted. Yep. I did have a relationship with her. I loved her. And what about Penelope? More to come next week. This article comes from Shmeng http://www.shmeng.com/ The URL for this story is: http://www.shmeng.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=721