It seems that this day disappeared almost entirely at the date line: I left Los Angeles airport shortly before midnight on October 3rd, and arrived in Hongkong at 5 in the morning of October 5th. In between these two was a fourteen hour flight, which makes October 4th about nine hours long - most of which I spent sleeping.
On this occasion, I finally figured out how the date line 'works'. Traveling west, you gain a little bit of time each time you cross into a new time zone. But to make up for that, the date line takes a big chunk of time away again. And traveling east, you lose a bit of time with each time zone, but then gain a chunk at the date line. Makes sense, doesn't it?
As you might have guessed reading the above, my trip from Mexico to Manila went through Los Angeles and Hongkong. At the Los Angeles airport, I finally discovered why passengers transiting through a US airport need to apply for the ESTA thingie online: the US makes everybody go through immigration and customs, even if you have an international connecting flight. Initially, I thought this didn't make sense at all, but if you look at the immigration procedure from a data gatherer's point of view, everything suddenly makes sense. At immigration, the US collect not only passport data for each passenger, but also record fingerprints for all ten fingers and shoot a picture. Quite a comprehensive database the US are building there, isn't it?
In my case, the funny part was that both the immigration officer and the guy who handled rechecking my bag were from the Philippines. The immigration officer even gave me tips on where (not) to go.
Walking through the LAX airport, I realized that the USA are indeed a great melting pot. There were people of all kinds of nationalities and ethnicities, chatting in Spanish, English, or some other language, all working together. At least on the first glance, this intercultural cooperation seemed much more advanced than anything I'd seen in South or Central America.
At one point, I went to one of LAX's many restrooms. Sitting on the toilet, I looked around frantically for the waste paper basket - but I could only see a tiny little one on the far side of the booth. Where did they expect me to deposit the toilet paper? And then I remembered: I wasn't in South America anymore, it was ok to flush paper down the toilet. What a strange feeling, after almost a year, to put toilet paper into the toilet once again!
