San Francisco, USA

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for flying Singapore Airlines. [Hiring some pilots would probably solve that problem.] We will shortly be arriving in Los Angeles. Please return your seats to the upright position and stow your tray tables. Smog masks will drop automatically from the panel above you - ensure you fit your own before helping others. Hire car companies can be found in the arrivals hall, and if for some reason you don't want to hire a car, there's a bus stop outside where you might be lucky enough to find some public transport. What was that? You wanted to catch a train from the airport? Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! That's a good one... We hope you enjoyed your flight.

Well, another day, another continent... although technically speaking, I arrived the same day I left. Gotta love the dateline!

Perhaps I'm being a little facetious in my description, but Los Angeles didn't seem all that impressive compared to other places I've been to. I was here in the summer of '99 on a family holiday, which conveniently means that I don't need to see the sights of the place - but there are surprisingly few sights to see for such a large city. Try and name more than four interesting places in Los Angeles that aren't theme parks (even Tokyo has a Disneyland): I can think of Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Long Beach and Malibu, and that's all!

By contrast, the rest of the city isn't interesting at all in the way that Tokyo was, where just walking round a neighbourhood is interesting enough to spend an hour or two doing. Being such a car-centric place actually makes the place look very ugly, with strip malls, car parks, freeways and few parks or public spaces to break the non-stop concrete. Being perhaps the quintessential example of an American decentralised city, I wasn't expecting to find a great deal in the city centre, but even then I was shocked: having walked from the so-called central railway station which is about a mile outside, every street I walked along in the downtown area seemed to be the back of the buildings facing it. There were no shops, no museums, no restaurants... eventually I found one block of park - one block! A lot of the land is essentially wasted, or used as car parking, and the rest is all faceless office blocks: hardly a grand centre to a city of 15 million people.

So, to culture shock. You'd think (I did too) that coming from Japan to the USA would be more of a reverse culture shock, yes? Well... sort of. Here's a few differences:

• Right and wrong: they drive on the wrong side of the road! I've been here nearly a week, and it's still hard to get used to, which is strange, as when I've been abroad before it's not difficult to adjust to the change at all.

• Size matters: everything is big here, from the people (horizontally, that is) to the cars (a standard sized British car would fit on the trailer of a standard pick-up truck here) to the city. On my way out on Monday on the train, it took 2 hours to leave the built-up area - 2 hours! Admittedly that's the longest way to do it, as the city spreads out furthest to the east.

• Language: this isn't so much of a change from Japan actually. I still can't understand about half of the adverts and most of the people, even when they are in English! It's surprising how quickly one can get used to living in a place and not understanding the language. It doesn't take long to settle into a state where everything just sails straight over your head, which makes it all the more startling to hear someone speaking English (in Tokyo, this was mainly at tourist attractions where someone would say "Please enjoy" or something similar to me). It's rather like the scene at the end of the film The Great Escape where the German policeman wishes the British officers "Good luck".

I'd planned the American part of my trip first, and it was actually the only part that I drew up an itinerary for - several actually - all of which involve a 30 day USA Rail Pass that's quite a bargain: with the current exchange rate, it works out at less than 8 pounds a day. My first trip was to the Grand Canyon (I've always wanted to see the Grand Canyon... so I did!) which involved an extremely long and drawn out succession of waiting, train, waiting, waiting, not sleeping, waiting, getting off, waiting, looking for something to eat, waiting, finally catching a bus from where it was only an hour and a half to the Canyon Rim. All this left me wondering whether it would actually be worthwhile. It was.

Postcards and pictures can't do it justice. Even if you've seen it on TV it's impossible to grasp the scale of the thing. And the best of all is: it's so big, even the Americans can't ruin it! The National Park Service have done a surprisingly good job of making the village aesthetic and not too garish, so much so that the American tourists seemed to think it was the best thing since sliced bread. ("We've done a picture with the Canyon. Get one with the village in the background" was genuinely what one family said. I almost fell in.) I wish I could have stayed longer, perhaps to do a hike part of the way down, but I didn't have long enough and I was still completely bushed from jet lag and a night with no sleep on the train. I can confidently report that the journey back was just as long and just as insomniac, but I got back to Los Angeles the next morning, where I jumped straight on to the next train, the "Coast Starlight" (it's a bit more interesting than "number 14", you have to admit) which runs along the coast... but you probably guessed that anyway.

Well, it doesn't make any claims of being fast, but in the end it took more than 14 hours to do less than 500 miles, which left me rather underwhelmed. Thankfully the scenery was worth it, but arriving in San Francisco at 1am was an interesting experience, more so when the transfer bus driver (the train stops across the bay in Oakland) said he couldn't drop anyone off at their hotel or hostel. Thankfully, the hostel I'm staying at was only about three blocks from the bus stop, so I made it there OK. My room-mate made the appropriate noises for being woken up at 1.15am and having to share the room from then on. (It hasn't stopped him from smoking in there though...) Now that I'm here, I've got to be pretty proactive to see anything resembling the city. Alcatraz will have to wait till my next visit (that's what I said last time!) and the Golden Gate Bridge had better not be covered in fog tomorrow! On Saturday I'll be going back to LA for a short weekend with my new friend John, and then on Monday I'll be off again... somewhere. I haven't decided where yet!