I didn’t have too hard a time getting up on Sunday; I don’t know if that was despite or because of my jet lag. I showered and packed in as much silence as I could, then hooked up my computer to the orphaned LAN cable dangling from the wireless router to check if there were e-mails I needed to read. At that moment, the doorbell rang. My friend Seema was a bit early picking me up, so I asked her in. It feels a little weird to ask someone into someone else’s house, but I wasn’t going to let her wait on the porch until I finished reading my e-mails.

Mom had written, fortunately. She’d left a message on Heather’s cell phone the night before that said: “Hi Heather, this is Margee Stücklin, Stephan’s Mom. Please tell Stephan that -” and there suddenly the signal went choppy and we couldn’t understand a word. But being Mom, she also wrote the same thing: she was coming to pick me up at the airport. Knowing that felt good.

I had to wake up Heather, not only to say goodbye, but also because my big suitcase with the microscope stood in her bedroom. With it out, we were almost ready to load; I had to put my computer away and stuff some other things into bags, which gave Seema and Heather some time to chat.

Seema and I drove (what else) to Beverly Hills, to the mosaic church that a friend of Seema’s had recommended. It turned out to be geared to young college students, primarily, with loud, repetitive music and an inspirational rather than an expository message. When it was over I still felt like something had been left out.

We drove on to Santa Monica, where we had Mexican food on Third Street promenade, and then made our way to the beach and the pier.  We ambled along the pier, past the showmen and tourist traps, and stood watching the waves crash against the pylons for a while until we realized that if I was to make my flight and we wanted an ice cream we had to hurry up.  We ended up settling for tea instead, and took it to the car.  The parking garage made me chuckle by having an Austrian-made Skidata access control system, but instead of installing machines where customers would insert their ticket and pay, reducing the labor intensity of running the garage, you still had to hand it to a lady who stuck it in a machine and charged you three dollars.

I got to the airport well on time, manhandled my luggage out of the trunk, and said goodbye.  At the check-in counter the guy told me that this time was okay, but to make sure in the future that my suitcases didn’t weigh more than 23 kilograms.  I don’t get it.  I got all the way to the US on the pretext that because I was heading there my luggage was okay, and now in the US they’re telling me it isn’t?  Of course I couldn’t just leave my baggage there at check-in, but had to lug it around to the TSA queue for security screening.  Now I’d understand this extra work if they detained me until the luggage was screened and deemed safe, but they just took my suitcase and sent me off.  If that’s their modus operandi, why can’t they just take my suitcase at check-in and send me off, and screen my stuff somewhere else?  Is the extra annoyance only to make passengers quite aware of the extra screening, so that perhaps they’d feel safe?

Well, that doesn’t work, because even though, in another example of Homeland Security zeal, they made me remove my camera from my camera bag, they still didn’t detect my suntan lotion.  Losers.  And while security checked my passport and boarding pass, I never passed customs on the way out.  I’d immigrated into the US with my US passport, but the guy at check-in had used my Swiss passport to check me in.  Depending on how connected the systems are, they’ll be wondering how they got a Swiss guy leaving who never entered in the first place.

I bought a vitamin water and a lemon-flavored Perrier (a poor substitute for the regular stuff) to go with the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups Seema had given me, which after the long wait in the car had gone quite liquid.  With that much to drink, you won’t be surprised I used the bathrooms, but if you know the state of those bathrooms you may be surprised to know I didn’t just hold it until the plane left.  It may be an international airport, but the bathrooms are in worse shape than those of a provincial baseball stadium after the seventh inning.

Rarely have I slept so poorly on a flight.  After all, it took off at 12:40 p.m. Australian time.  I may have caught an hour or two of sleep, no more, watching Shrek 3 and Next and other movies and shows I didn’t really want to watch instead.  The plane got in early, and unlike all other airports I fly to I didn’t have this feeling of “What is this place and why am I here?”  This was where I belong.  It’s strange that even four weeks elsewhere cannot dispel that gut feeling.

But I wasn’t unaffected.  Driving from my parents’ house to my apartment in their car, I hit the windshield wipers a few times to indicate turns.