Breaking Out the Big Guns

I'll start from the beginning with the flight. I had a preliminary scare when I get to the check in desk. The lady asks me if I had applied for my visa exemption. I reply "huh?". She looks at me with a half oh shit/what do you mean huh? expession. I reply "I'm Canadian". She looks relieved. I did too. Later, I was waiting in the terminal crying from listening to a comedy skit by Doug Stanhope. I then hear my name over the intercom, paging me to come to the bording desk. Uh-oh. I get there and am informed that they are changing my seat, but I still get to keep my isle seat. I instantly imagine being seated next to a four hundred pound alcoholic with a peanut sized bladder, and a woman with a collachy babynext to him. Fortunately, there was no woman or baby, and the guy was only two hundred and fifty pounds, and had to piss twice. Instead he took up the entire fucking armrest the whole flight, and by touchdown my arm was ready to grow legs and rip itself off my body in order to get some movement.

Running on three hours of sleep, I file into the customs line with all the inbound Aussies. The border official was friendly, and processed me quickly. I go to the end of the hall to where another official is collection the customs slips, and upon looking at mine informs me I need to report for bag inspection. Great, I thought. My initial hope that my luck with the American border fuzz was improving was dashed. I go up the kiosk and report to an older female border guard. She checks my passport and asks me to open my bags. And then she proceeds to look through everything. I mean EVERYTHING.

She finds a folder that I keep my documents in (travel documents, tax stuff from Aus, etc.) and starts salivating. Then the questions come. I think she asked me every question in a border pigs reperatoire (note my increasing hostility). Where have you been traveling? How long did you work in Australia for? How long did you work in India for? What were you doing in China? Are you presently employed? What was your employment in Australia? What kind of factory was it? What are these railway documents? Have you worked for a railroad before? 

This woman did not miss a detail. She even found a shipping receipt from a package I'd shipped home from Australia the day before. Who's Doug? Fuck sakes, lady, I thought. The weirdest part of it all was when she found my books. Found is an understatement, she honed in on them like a fat kid on a Smartee. The first one is a book I bought in Papua New Guinea, and is about a British Field Marshall in WWII Burma, and is not a well known piece of literature. What's this? That question was repeated five times throughout the interrogation. The other book was by Dan Brown, a well known author, so she didn't spend so much time on that one. It was very strange though, and not genuine interest (the I'd like to read this sometime sort), but more like she was looking for subversive literature. I hadn't even had that happen when I went to Communist China! It just shows how Orwellian this country is becoming.

The shit ended there, however, and I was permitted to enter America. I get to my hostel at 8:30am, but my hopes of sleep are dashed when I'm informed I can't check in until 4pm. It was a nice day though, so I took advantage of it and made a move for Pearl Harbour, catching the local bus after a giant breakfast and much needed coffee at Denny's. The ride took almost an hour one way, and I arrived at Pearl under the noon sun. I caught a shuttle right away to the Missouri Battleship Monument, and wandered around there for two hours. I am a war buff, and that battleship is the pinnacle of what gets a war buff hard. It was pure awesome seeing the gigantic sixteen inch guns and various Tomahawk and Harpoon missile launchers. My only beef was that I couldn't see the Operations Room. After that I caught the boat over to the Arizona Memorial, which is the sunken ruin of the Battleship USS Arizona, which remains just below the surface to see, after she was sunk by the Japanese in WWII. One other awesome part of that trip was when I got to see a couple of F-22 Raports flying around the harbour.

After that I caught the bus back to Waikiki and checked into my room to catch an hour of sleep. The jet lag was still with me so one hour was all I could manage. I got up, grabbed some food and a twenty four ounce beer for $3.19! I love alcohol prices in the US! I hung around with some people from the hostel for the rest of the night and crashed for eleven hours. Now here I am. I booked a hostel on the North Shore this Saturday for four nights and confirmed a dive for tomorrow. Now to the beach I go!!!