Manhattan Pier, Los Angeles

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Originally uploaded by blhouston.

We've landed in the U.S.A. at last. Weeks of packing and days of cleaning and vacating the rental house seemed to drag on and on. Our departure date felt like an unreachable conclusion to some frustrating dream sequence, where instead we find ourselves scrubbing walls forever.

We approached the Immigration queue at L.A. airport with trepidation, expecting to be interrogated for inadvertently filling out our visa waiver forms incorrectly, or for Brian being in posession of an Australian passport or for being the unfortunate victim of some aggressively paranoid officer's decision that we were suspect terrorists.

We needen't have been so worried. That type of experience awaited us at another time. For now, however, the officer was cool, he patiently waited as we filled in the four back sides to our entry forms which we'd accidently left blank, politely asked us our travel plans and didn't admonish Brian for using his Australian passport, even though he was also a U.S. citizen.

Ah L.A., what an amazing pit of human civilization. In many ways, it seemed not to have changed. Same monotonous view of red roofs and blue pools from our plane window. Same lines of traffic snaking down the 405. Same massive portions of food. Too many choices of consumables. I get so lost listening to the choices of dressing to go with my order of salad, I end up staring at the waiter, lost in a state of choice-overload.

We had one positive impression about L.A. For a city with half the population of Australia, transportation is so much better. We travelled up and down the coast in our Dodge hire car between LAX and our old haunts of Torrance and Redondo Beach and not once experienced a traffic jam. Of course we stayed off the 405, but even though all main roads were always full of traffic, it flowed well and drivers were polite and patient. Gold Coast roads in comparison are congested and slow to a crawl and the drivers are subsequently frustrated and aggressive, desperately trying to reach their destinations.

We took the kids to our favourite eating places, Rubios with its fabulous fish tacos, inspiration for our food van business, and because my favourite Japanes restaurant, Takefuku, nearby my old workplace of GEOS was closed, we settled for the food court at a Japanese supermarket complex on Western Blvd.

We spent the day at Manhattan Beach so the kids could swim in the waters of the other side of the Pacific. The water was very cold as was the breeze. I'd forgotten how cool L.A. can be in summer.

In the aquarium at the end of Manhattan Pier are fish tanks with a variety of sharks and other sea creatures, including some Port Jackson shark eggs. I didn't realize that these are Australian sharks until I mentioned to the attendant that we have sharks in Australia that lay the same kind of eggs. He nodded, saying that they were in fact Australian. The eggs look like seaweed and curl around in a spiral.