I'm in America!

Hey all!  I'm in America!  Land of the free, home of the people who believe in customer service.

The trip, of course, was not without drama.  Which started in Hannover, when the ladies behind the counter let it slip that neither of them had any idea how to check our bags.  Reassuring, but we got through it.  Then the guy in front of me in the security line put his computer through the scanner and it, or some part of it, came out looking like a bomb.  This resulted in the security guys shutting down the entire gate and locking everyone behind bullet-proof glass until a sufficient number of people in uniform were called over to emphatically point at things.  After about fifteen minutes, they finally decided said computer was a computer, and let it go through.  In the meantime, I got ragged on by Jolly Customs Officer for not speaking Portuguese.

Drama Number 2 occurred in Heathrow, where, once again, the guy in front of appeared to be carrying a bomb in his bag.  Security went crazy-pants, but at that point my stuff was already through the scanner.  In the end, because there would probably be Inquiries with a capital I at Heathrow if they ever shut down an entire terminal's worth of security over a Danish guy with a plug adapter, they just diverted our scanned stuff to another line.

Above all though, the most entertaining part of the flight was listening to the Swedish teenagers behind me on the plane practicing their responses to hypothetical questions about their motherland as posed to them by Americans.  Answered included "We eat cold rocks for breakfast, " "Cars freeze in Sweden so we get to school via polar bear," and "Saturday is a special day, that's when we eat our rocks warm for breakfast."

Upon arriving home, I discovered that my father had more or less turned my room into a guest room, and there were several important changes I had to make before I could sleep in the bed.  These included: 1) re-inflating the blow-up dinosaur; 2) removing the bedside table on crime of hideousness and suspicion of being haunted by a poltergeist; 3) trading the ugly lamp on the haunted table out for my attractive college one, d) switching out the comforter for one that didn't look like people died under it during the Spanish flu epidemic, and e) hunting down my remote-controlled helicopter.  The latter is a requirement to my life--how else do you expect me to deliver notes to people in the next room?