The Great Adventure is about to start. My flight leaves tomorrow at about 1:40, and I just checked in. Apparently I'm in 61A, although I thought I was going to be in 60A. Doesn't matter. Getting this far has been a roller-coaster ride in itself.

The main issue was the visa. I was at the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square back last Thursday. It's a fairly scary place seeing as it looks like they just picked up a US Govt. building that they didn't want in Washington (or somewhere) and then flew it in bits over here. The gold-plated eagle statue on top finishes off it's tackiness and faux-intimidation quite well. Anyway, once I got past the men-with-guns, I then found out I had to queue for lots of things. My first queue was to get in the building, this was short, and consisted of me and another person. After that, I had to queue to go through security (outside), then security (inside) and finally joined a small queue to get a ticket. On the ticket was printed a number which I was told would be called. As this was being explained to me, I heard number 231 being called out. My number was 361. By this point I was a little annoyed and went to sit down amongst the 250 other people who had been given 'appointments' at this particular time.

Time passed. About an hour and a half later, my number was finally called. I went to the correct window, where I was fingerprinted and my paperwork was taken off me. After about 3 minutes, I was told to sit down again and my number would be called for interview. It was about now that it dawned on me that I had been queueing for and hour and a half to actually get into the queue for interview. Dejected and pissed off, I sat down again. During these long lamenting periods of utter boredom, I tried to amuse myself with theories about how the numbering system worked. It seemed that there were 4 queues: Non-immigrant, Immigrant, Interview and DHS with about 120, 14, 70 and 3 people in them on average, respectively. The first queue was what I was in for the aforementioned hour and a half and I imagine the second queue was the similar queue for immigrant visa applications. These were quite predictable as the numbers were called in order. However, everyone basically ended up in the "Interview" queue, regardless of what you were applying for. Because you can get any one of about 30,000 (or so) different types of visa to the US, this meant that every application went through a varying amount of processing time before the interview was ready, and therefore the numbers for this queue were called completely at random. The downside of this was that I actually had to stay awake for the next hour waiting for my number, with no indication of when it would be. I saw people being called within 10 minutes of giving their paperwork in, and I saw people who looked like they had actually been there since 6am.

Eventually, I was told to go to window number 22, which, in the cluster of interview windows, was the only one with a chair in front of it. Intruiged by this, I sat down and was immediately engaged in conversation which went like this:

• I(nterviewer): So, you did Chemistry at Cambridge
• Me: Yes
• I: What do you know about biological warfare?
• Me: (blink)
• I: It says on your form that you have experience handling biological warfare agents
• Me: No (you moron), it actually asks if I have experience handling either chemical, radioactive or biohazardous materials. I ticked yes because that's true for 2 out of those 3 things.
• I: Nice smile

I could tell from this point that this might be quite interesting.

Sadly, it only got more boring as the interviewer seemed to refuse to conceive of the fact that I work for a company who are sending me to another country in order to become experienced in the way that they do things. The fact that I didn't have a detailed "Training Schedule" seemed to aid him his this stubbornness. Eventually, after about 10 minutes of me becoming more frustrated, he asked me what I hoped to learn, so I told him. Then he told me he'd decided to issue me a visa (how nice!). Seemed like the whole point of the interview was to see how I reacted when presented with a seemingly stupid US beaurocrat asking me awkward questions about what I did. Seems like getting frustrated and saying the same thing over is what people who aren't terrorists do. Cunning.

After this entire lengthy, sweaty, exausting and frustrating process, I then had to queue to pay a courier to ship my passport back to me. They told me that I had to receive it myself and present the guy with ID when he delivered it to me. I found out they were wrong when, the following Tuesday, the courier turned up and happily dropped off my passport to someone else at my house who simply waved a photocopy of my passport at him. Oh well.

So there we go. I've got the visa. My apartment exists and is booked. The delivery guys came this morning to put all my bulky stuff on a plane. I've got my boarding pass. Next thing you know I'll be wandering the streets of some vaguely familiar US city looking for things to buy. I'll keep you posted as to what happens.

P.S. Go see Avenue Q! Don't ask why, just go see it!

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I'm here. The flight was a rather warm hour late taking off, but once we were in the air, the air-conditioning kicked in and it got a little bit nicer. The immigration process was surprisingly uneventful, as was the taxi ride to the city. One thing I like about that particular journey is that as you approach Manhattan from the west, the road goes round a curve and suddenly this huge skyline appears in the haze and stretches most of the way across your field of view. I've seen it before, many times, but the New York skyline never fails to be breathtaking when seen from that point of view. Once you actually get through the midtown tunnel, it becomes more mundane and familiar.

I arrived at my apartment on west 48th street and was pleased to see it's a good size, in a good location, with a good view (14th floor) and with most things included (cable, kitchen, sofas etc). The balcony was a particularly nice find. My first quest was to find a way, at 6pm on a Saturday night, to a) get a drink and b) get some sort of wireless working so I could set up my email and pick up my Skype voicemails. I decided that (a) was too easy and that I was much too tired for that sort of thing. (b) was a whole adventure in itself however. First I had to find a shop selling something of that sort, so I stumbled across a BestBuy on 5th avenue. I needed a webcam as well, so it suited my needs. Anyway, it was in there that I overheard a guy, lets call him Mr. D(umbass), asking the cashier, after he had paid, whether his brand new iPod would work outside of the US. The cashier looked a little puzzled and said that it would, as he just needed to plug it into his laptop. However, Mr. D wasn't having any of this. He wanted to know if it would play his music when he was in a different country. Thus ensued a frantic summoning of a "sales assistant" to explain to him that he was being a little bit silly. Now, it could be that coincidentally, within 2 hours of arriving in the country I had discovered the most stupid person in the state. Or, it could be that this sort of thing is really common. I don't know yet. I'm hoping Mr. D is unique. Anyways, I got everything I needed (although I now need to return half of it - different story).

That was yesterday. Today was my first full day and annoyingly, I was up at 7am. This was probably because I thought it was midday and therefore should be tucking into lunch. In any case, I checked the opening times of B&H and then headed out to wander round town. At about 10, I headed down to B&H and managed to buy a new lens for the camera which I'm rather pleased with. It's a Canon 10-22mm and 'wide' doesn't quite cover what this lens can do. I've yet to fully find a good way to take pictures, but it's fun experimenting, especially when I'm surrounded by huge buildings that I could never previously get fully into one shot. I meant to go up to the park in the afternoon to have a look around there, but the temperature hit about 40 degrees and stayed there, so I gave up.

So, I'm still on UK time, but I've found the supermarket. I'd never thought about that part of living here really, as the last 3 times i was here, the company paid for most things. But I've cooked now, so I feel like I'm properly living here.

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According to Silktide, this website could be better. I always knew it, now I have the hard cold dead facts in front of me to prompt me to do something about it. This won't just be another pointless redesign either, I quite like this style. I want to do something that'll make a difference to the free world! Something that will conquer evil! Something that will help everyone to get along better!

SOMETHING GREAT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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