I am only in the United States for one hour when the country already begins to annoy me. Surprisingly, it happens before someone with a big smile has said 'how y'all doing today?', before I see a star spangled banner flying from somebody's house, and indeed before I have had to heave my rucksack through a pedestrian-unfriendly city with piss-poor public transport.
My first 60 minutes in the US are spent in a long queue of Mexicans waiting to get 'permiso' to enter the country and be a part of the American Dream. There are 15 windows at the US Immigration desk at the border point between Ciudade De Juarez, Chihuaha and El Paso, Texas, but only one extremely bored looking official sitting behind them, or two if you count the similarly uniformed woman that appears to be doing nothing except combing her hair.
My second hour in the US is spent slowly moving up the same queue of Mexicans, the bored offical seemingly disappearing on a toilet break between motioning forward each Mexican wanting to enter the country to his window. As I sit impatiently waiting my turn, I am already suspecting his weak bladder is part of a deliberate US Immigration and Homeland Security policy of delay tactics, to make it so excruciatingly slow and frustrating to enter the US from the south that Mexicans decide to stay in their own country instead.
After two and a bit hours of waiting, I do eventually get to the front of the queue, and the US immigration offical immediately becomes overly polite and friendly when I pass him my British passport. Unfortunately for him and his country, it is too late for jokes about the upcoming football (not soccer) world cup. The damage has already been done. My general distaste for most things American has already been refreshed in my head.
When I finally walk onto US soil with my freshly-stamped green visa waiver, further damage is done, this time to the wallet of a Scotsman travelling on a shoestring budget. My *&%$# bus that I was travelling on from Chihuahua has departed for El Paso bus station without me, because I have taken so long to clear US immigrations.
I grab a taxi, grit my teeth and curse the land of the free.
