My first trip to the US (Dec 23 1998)

In the first weekend itself I went to Lake Tahoe and skied.

In the second weekend, I went to SantaCruz and a place called "Mystery Spot". It is rightly named so. Situated in a hill, it consists of an area of 150 metres dia(I am still talking in metres guys, notice that!). The area is downhill; so, when you drop a ball, you expect it to roll downhill; NOT HERE! It rolls uphill. Nothing is wrong with the ball. The gravity is reversed in this small region, no idea why. If you have noticed people standing on a hill, normally, their feet is behind them, assuming they are facing uphill. Here too the same thing happens, only that you can almost feel someone pushing you uphill, so you are inclined more! Funny place,!

Santacruz is just a weekend spot. Nothing much. There is a scenic drive by the name "17 mile drive". Winding along the coast, it IS a pleasure to drive through that road...

The next week we went to "Kadala Kadala" in Naz - a Pakistani theater which usually hosts tamil movies in the weekends. It is in Fremont. It is purely a crazy Mohan's Drama - Nothing much to say about it!

Got the tickets for a funworld sort of theme park - Great America, but could never make it in time, so I sold the tickets.

After that, we planned our trip to LA on a weekend. My friend Madasamy drove us from San Jose to LA. Cudos to him! He drove 400+ miles in one night and had the energy to stand in the queues the next day for all the rides, without once complaining!

We had booked rooms at LA, got up early on Saturday and went first to DisneyLand. This is 2nd best to the DisneyWorld at Florida, or so I hear, but nevertheless, it was great! Only trouble was - it was so overcrowded that for every ride lasting 2-3 minutes, we had to stand in a queue for at least 45 minutes. The best were Splash mountain, Space trip and of course the night show on Water. Aye, they projected a small cartoon movie - it was a combination; sometimes people would be enacting Disney characters on the stage in the middle of a pond and sometimes they would project the same characters for the other portions of the cartoon on screen made of water! - it was fascinating, and made the entire day's wait (well mostly wait and sometimes ride) worthy...

The next day we went to Universal Studios. The tram ride was eventful, with KingKong trying to stop us, Los Angeles experiencing an earthquake, the tram entering an volcano(did you see Dante's Peak?), and us sitting there ducks for the thieves from the wild west(we are in the heart of the wild west, aren't we!) asking us to give out wallets and the sherif coming to protect us, and all childish thingies like that happening. We were also pointed to some of the studios, but weren't taken inside :(.

Water World is a show wherein they enact the happening of the movie, "Water World", live. Breathtaking stunt sequences, all done fast, live, made it interesting...

Jurassic Park, the Ride, was obviously another ride, but this time, we went twice for this ride - crowd was less, we needed the photo as a memento and so posed properly. You guys should see me in that Photo; Looks great! Got all wet, but hey, I love getting wet.

Back to the Future is another ride. That's a damn good one, showing you the depths of Simulation. You sit in one place and thanks to the simulation on the screen and sound effects (and aided by occasional rocking of your car), it looks and feels real!

Food was pathetic @ US. Got a cheese pizza that tasted yuk! If you are a veggie, braze yourself... my friends got a cold breast of turkey, so beware!

There were other bits and pieces. Like me being rechristened "Thel" (scorpion) - I was repeatedly dropping, pouring, or losing my grip on some food item or another, right from our first ride to Tahoe so that my friends were afraid of giving any food items to me, esp. in the car!

I went to Jeans on the last day of my stay at U.S. (again in Naz). While Aish looks devastating, the movie bombs pathetically. To me, the beginning of the movie seemed to be a recap of what I saw in U.S. since they showed Universal Studios and Disney Land in the second song. Songs are good, but I guess Shankar is setting a trend, - First movie, GentleMan had a theme and a story. 2nd, "Kadalan" was pathetic, taken for the so called "masses". 3rd movie, "Indian" was good, with a theme and a story. 4th, "Jeans' a movie that has taken 2+ years to make it stupid, fit only for Kunjumone to watch(he wasn't the producer though! - I meant his stupidity). In all the movies, only the songs are good and he exploits the heroines well...

On my way to Chennai, I had to spend 9 hours in Singapore. I went out with my friend by taking a transit visa. I went to Mustafa and bought some perfumes, emergency lights and a cord-less phone.

On my final flight journey (in the series of 6 take offs) there was a worst turbulence on the way from Singapore to Madras. The flight dropped around 500 meters. You can imagine what would have happened inside the flight. It happened after 1 hour of travel from Singapore. The pilot could not detect that with radar. When he warned about that it was too late. I was at the last seat in the tail of the flight. Luckily I wore the seat belt but it was loose. So, I went up around 1 feet high and came back to the seat. 2 persons who didn't wear their seat belts hit the top of the flight and got blood injuries. One guy got sprain in his neck. When they are about to serve the food, it all happened. So, all food spilled over the flight and they were not able to serve the food thereafter. Even they were discussing the idea of returning the flight to Singapore. Then they proceeded on their way to Madras.

So, guys never never remove the belt when you do flight journey.

I got caught in customs also in which I had to pay(bribe !!) 50 Singapore dollars.

This is how my first trip to U.S. concluded with a thrilling and bit sad climax. Anyway overall, the trip was nice and was a good experience in a different world (as Americans think !!).