Rick in the USA.

So upon arriving at the airport I get a lovely surprise in the form of a 5 hour flight delay. Wonderful start and it puts in doubt my making my train in LA on time. The flight was 11 hours and very boring but free food and stuff so hey whatever. When I finally touched down it was 2, and my train left at 5. Cool, I'll have plenty of time I thought. TSA SAYS NO! Everyone who landed had to go through some retarded "processing" which consisted of nothing but looking at my passport, taking fingerprints (which they already took at my visa interview) and stamping far too much. This happened after I had to wait in that line for a total of 1 hour and 30 minutes. They had 4 people doing the processing. They have two Boeing 747s worth of people land, and they assign FOUR people? Over half the stations were unmanned. So I finally finished with about an hour until my train, and luckily the bus to the station came just as I got to the pick up point. Arrived at the station 15 minutes before departure, no ticket printed and no idea where I was going. I ended up getting on the train minutes before it left. I'm currently sitting in my hotel room wondering what I'm gonna eat.

Impressions of LA were oh my god it's so huge (saw a lot from the plane). When I touched down I was disappointed. LA looks like a lot of ghetto and lots of highways. Also I'm not sure if it was just low cloud or LA has a lot of smog over it. And I thought that, being an international travel hub, LAX would have looked a lot more flash. Well, off to San Diego tomorrow!

Well first of all.....welcome to the United States Rick!

Second, this is something you should know, even though I do have reservations about it: Upon arriving in the United States, the U.S. Immigration and Customs will have to process every person coming into the country for security reasons, which means taking down every bit of info about them and spending a lot of time in the process (and I should've warned you about that ahead of time ). Its tedious, its bureaucracy BS (IMO), and such, but such is the way of documenting everyone who's coming into the United States legally. /not implying immigration debates here, tyvm

You probably saw a lot of smog (LA has quite a bit of it too) upon arriving; LA's notorious for it in the past, and even today (but it isn't as bad as it used to be). Then again, it was quite foggy earlier this morning, soooo.

Also do note: LAX is about 15-18 miles (? kilometers) from downtown LA. You haven't seen all of LA yet

Just curious: Are you in Oceanside or Carlsbad atm? If not in either of those cities, where are you staying?