Do the flight thing

On my second day in California, Penny the co-worker invited me to have lunch in a strip mall near our hotel. The prices on the menus slightly scandalized us. We were still in that phase where you convert everything to the currency you’re used to, like what’s usual with first-time travelers to a foreign country. It took us a while before settling for an Italian restaurant based solely on the size of the entrée a woman sitting beside their shop window was eating. A few minutes later, a waiter came to get our orders. We looked up, and there was an awkward and rather uncomfortable pause. He was a dead-ringer for the consul that interviewed us in the US Embassy in Manila a couple of weeks back.  

“Didn’t he look like the interviewer at the embassy?” Penny asked after he walked away.

“Yes, he did,” I told her, pausing for a second after taking a bite out of the crostini the waiter put on the table. Was that for free? “Quiet honestly, he made me nervous. It’s like a visa interview all over again.”

While I made the association purely in jest, the nervousness I recalled was very real. Everyone, I guess, is aware of how high-profile getting a US visa can sometimes be, given all the fuss around the process. It’s quite difficult not to attach your ego to your visa application, especially when you find yourself among that throng of people lining up at the embassy. In that line, it’s common to see sentiments and high hopes pinned shamelessly on one’s shoulders. In many ways, America is still the “Mothership” to a lot of people, knowingly or unknowingly. 

A trip to that country we mostly know from the movies, albeit for business purposes only, will carry weight somewhat, regardless of how you perceive the culture. I’m not sure now if our consul really made an appearance that day at the restaurant, or if this is just a reminder of the carnival we had to go through to get there.

On paper, a 12-hour flight doesn’t seem to be too difficult. You figure you can watch a couple of movies (four hours), eat dinner and breakfast (an hour each) and sleep the rest of the way. The concept, of course, was very different from how it eventually played out.

I was an excited first-time traveler and arrived at the airport three hours before our flight as our ticket suggested. My company used to fly its employees in business class when going to San Francisco, and I thankfully discovered that long lines are nonexistent if you’re in this section. There were, for example, four or five lines for business class (not that many passengers) as opposed to the two lines for the rest of the plane. Then you get to board first, before everyone else, and disembark first. From what I was told, you are served food first during the flight. In addition to this, you wait in a separate lounge at the airport. The working-class man in me objected to this, but since this was a free lunch anyway, I didn’t find enough reason to complain.  

The “exclusive” lounge (much talked about in our office) was filled with sleeping foreigners and a few yuppies who were trying to look busy with their laptops. There was a modest buffet of treats for the passengers in business class. The chocolate-dipped strawberries that were much talked about in our office were not available, and in place of these there were messy-to-eat sweets and the airline’s signature porridge. The latter was memorable, not really because of any culinary stroke of genius, but because of the shredded dried fish put on top — the exact same way they cook it in wet-market eateries. The innovation was a nice touch: sneaking in third world exotica and putting it in nice china to be called gourmet. 

On the plane, we were greeted by the head attendant, who in my mind I referred to as “Frau,” largely because she sort of looked like the humorless German innkeeper stereotype you see in old movies. She hardly ever smiled, but her demeanor overall seemed sweet and caring enough. She disappeared promptly after her greeting, and reappeared only twice during the flight — when she hovered momentarily, in an almost dramatic way, behind the other attendants when they served dinner (after which she disappeared again) and when she bade everyone goodbye in San Francisco in a cool and reserved voice that reminded me of Tiya Dely Magpayo. She also announced over the PA that meat products were not allowed and customs would confiscate these, so if necessary one could leave them on the plane.

(I loved the attendants. I asked for a banana, which is not on their menu, and in no time they came up with not just one, but two bananas. I asked for another one. When I told the attendant “I love you” because she gave me a third banana, she told me, “We love you too, sir.” I wonder now if they’re as sweet as this when assigned to a coach?)

Despite the elaborately arranged dinner and breakfast (both are three- course meals in our section), pampering cabin attendants and spacious seats, the flight was, hands down, the most frightening and boring travel experience I ever had.   Only a few minutes after the plane left Manila, we were met by heavy rain, complete with thunder and lightning. I whispered to God (who I haven’t really spoken to in a long time) “Sana po makita ng piloto ang dinadaanan niya,” immediately afterward translating the whispered prayer into English, in case the Americans were right and God spoke only English.  

They turned off the lights inside the plane after dinner, still following the schedule of Manila’s time zone. The cabin began to smell slightly of socks and, soon thereafter, one needed headphones to drown out the orchestra of snoring. I did try to sleep but was jolted awake multiple times during the night because of turbulence. And these were not the short jolts you see in movies. These were hour-long thumpings and bumpings. I imagined that was how Thumbelina would have felt if she got trapped in a washing machine. While seriously terrifying, however, it sort of felt good once you got used to it. The jolting felt pretty much like a massage.  

The sole purpose of my first visit to the US was business. I was to meet and train with colleagues from the Mothership-based company of Factorytown. 

My boss wasn’t available to pick us up on the day of our arrival and a transfer wasn’t arranged so our group had to figure out how to get to the hotel on our own. Everyone seemed to be of a different racial background at the airport: from the immigrations officer (he was Mexican), to the toilet janitor (who was telling a joke in Korean), to the girl at the foreign exchange booth (Taiwanese; just had to ask). Save for a nice policeman straight out of Sesame Street (we asked him about taxi tipping conventions, and we were given a short and sweet speech about how we can call the police anytime for help, and welcome to the country, etc.), we in fact did not meet anyone with an “American accent” until we got to our hotel, and that receptionist who sounded American was from Sta. Cruz in Laguna.

We ended up taking a mini-van driven by an old Yiddish man with a beard bigger than the Hallmark-card Santa Claus. Initially, I thought he was pissed off with the amount of baggage we had, which he insisted on loading into the back of the van himself. On the way to the hotel, we exchanged very few words: me asking if the bridge we are seeing from Bay Bridge was the Golden Gate, and him telling me no, and asking us what country we were from. At the hotel, however, after helping us bring our gigantic bags out, he jokingly remarked “Marami!” He whispered to me that he was actually married to a Filipina. He told us to have a safe stay, and sheepishly said “Salamat din” when we told him “Salamat.”

The group I traveled with was billeted in a hotel in Emeryville, a small suburb in between Oakland and Berkeley and across the bridge from San Francisco. It used to be a train yard, and was revitalized for new development in the ‘90s. The district looked like a newer and spunkier Legaspi Village. My room that night was facing Oakland. If I got one on the other side of the building, my view would be the lights of San Francisco, from across the bay. Over the next four weeks, I’d discover these two cities along with the other suburbs of the Bay Area.

My initial apprehension about being a foreigner in America was that I’d have to play the role of tourist one way or another — the stereotype you take shopping or to “historical” places that charge for tickets and lead you through a pre-programmed tour. While exciting and fun by itself, that kind of traveling is alienating. You never get to feel the real vibe of the place; you never get to see the real color. That would have been a sad prospect for the Bay Area, as this region of California was the hotspot for almost all the major cultural movements in the state for the past century. It was home to the hippies, melting pot for beat literature, turning point for the LGBT movement, and even host to the most unconventionally devious fetish festival in the world. 

Looking out the window, however, I saw people lined up for the evening bus, probably going home after work, as that section of Emeryville was all hotels and shops. Very proletariat. I felt that all I need to do was blend in, somehow. In the Philippines, in Factorytown, I’m just like them. Their culture is my culture, on different sides of the Pacific. I guess I won’t be alienated after all, if I so choose.

(To be continued)

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E-mail the author:  jaclynjoseforever@yahoo.com.