Arriving at LAX – Here I come!

It’s been almost 7 months since I came to the States and I’m totally a different person than that young lady that took that plane last year. It was December 26th. I said goodbye to my parents and my grandparents at the Buenos Aires Airport. I try to remember my perspective at that moment. The first time I was getting on a plane, the first big trip of my life. I do recall being unable to believe that I was going to leave Argentina. Even when I had the plane ticket in my hands I was expecting something to happen that would stop me from coming. That’s how I am.
It was I and my hand suitcase now, both afraid of not passing the check in. But we did, and the plane was leaving to Peru. I arrived at the Peru airport without thinking I was going to be robed. They took my deodorant, my polish remover, my anti cellulite cream and something else I don’t remember at the airport because it wasn’t allowed to enter on the hand suitcases to the US. I was mad. I didn’t want to smell the next morning, and believe me, I was going to. As a matter of fact, I was starting to smell that same moment and I wasn’t fast enough to tell the guy that was mugging me to let me use my deodorant one last time. But I didn’t and I took a picture of my angry face and I promised myself never return to Peru.
When the plane was leaving to LA finally, I saw a plane parked on the side that said in Spanish “heaven” and I got scared, what if it was a sign and I was going to die? Please God, don’t let me die in Peru, make it either in my country or in the US, please please.
Nothing happened, obviously. Still, I had another challenge: to get in the US, to pass the controls. I had everything on my side, the Green Card on my passport, all the paper work, everything, but still. I didn’t want to be Tom Hanks in that movie; you know what I’m talking about.
I was feeling uncomfortable in my dirty clothes and I was getting nervous and sweaty. They checked everything and told me to sit down. The officers looked at me a couple of times, and one of them called me by mi middle name Belen (Bethlehem). I dared to correct him and he said: No, Belen is better, it’s Christmas. Ok, officer, just let me go!
I saw California for the first time, I had no idea what to expect. It wasn’t as beautiful as I expected at first, especially because the first to months I lived with a family from Guatemala that didn’t really lived the American way.
Everything was new. I realized what a first world country was about: organized structure. I went to a public restroom and it had toilet paper! Warm water!
The bus has air conditioning and you ask a stop pulling a cord! No horn noise in the streets and many other things amazed me at first. A girl from the City into another City.
We need to stop here and make an analysis of this. Not everyone, at the age of 23, leaves family and friends to jump to the unknown. It’s a life adventure. Buenos Aires was, in a way, part of the past. My eyes were ready for the new city. I was there, here, in Los Angeles, California. This is a place that the rest of the world sees on TV since we remember, and I was finally here. The United States of America, the emblematic country. So many of us idealized it so much, but still, how many cool things were waiting for most of adventurers.
Of course, I wasn’t going to be in LA until I saw someone famous, but wasn’t going to happen after two months, after I left the Guatemala consulate I was living in to move somewhere else. We all have different arrival experiences. I was lucky to have them. In my post-teenage mind, the “LA experience” hadn’t start.
I do want to remark about my very first friend in LA. A few weeks before I departed from Buenos Aires, I started exploring different web pages to make friends in Los Angeles, before hand. I got –I have no idea how- in a singles page. I started talking to this guy, Zach. We wrote a couple of e-mails and as soon as I arrived in LA, I called him. We hang out a couple if times and he helped me a lot until he moved to Arizona with his friends. He was in LA for his music, but moved anyway where his guitarist was. Zach is been in a way an oasis. He told me the States was nothing like what I was living at that time and he encouraged me to stay. Here I am.
And this trip showed me that I can go anywhere I want.