Daniele Somenzi's United States

In January there's a bitter cold, and in New York even more so. The Pan Am flight with a Boeing 747 was one of the last; shortly afterwards the airline, following the Lockerbie events, went bust. I was just in time to sample the legendary airline. The youth hostel in Manhattan was not very welcoming, and the people there were not very trustworthy, so I fraternised with a couple of Italians who had just arrived like me. The Empire State Building from the top is truly beautiful and the view of New York is unique. Even the ice rink at the foot of the skyscraper is appealing. The Brazilian girl I met gave me her address in Rio, with the promise that I would visit her (3 months later, I was at her place for a night). But we'll talk about that later. The Twin Towers, majestic, blocked the view of the Statue of Liberty.

The Rockefeller Centre in January, with its ice rink, is just one of Manhattan's attractions.

A couple of days later I took the plane again, another Pan Am 747 bound for Miami. Curious the fact that they fed everyone except those who boarded stand-by and a couple of pilots heading home, a sign of some serious belt-tightening.

Arriving in Miami for the first time in my life, I stayed for a while at the youth hostel on Ocean Drive in Miami Beach. There I met Fabrizio from Desenzano, also there to gain experience in work and life.

He worked as a night porter in a nearby hotel and often in the evening I would go and have a chat with him. I, on the other hand, worked as a waiter for a while in an Italian restaurant where there wasn't even an Italian owner — they were all Cubans. I was the only one.

One evening I walked into a club and saw that on the stage a woman was stripping naked; that's why they asked my age at the entrance. You don't pay for a ticket but a beer costs three times as much; well, I took the opportunity to get an eyeful and then left.

The Club News disco, on the other hand, I went to several times, even though these aren't my typical scenes. Here in the USA they don't use degrees to measure temperature but Fahrenheit; what confusion when the big clock hanging on a building showed the temperature. Anyway, even though it was January, it was warm.

The big channel at the start of Ocean Drive was built to let the big cruise ships leave the nearby port for the open sea, and sometimes I went to watch the giant of the seas set off on a cruise, and I thought: what would it be like, how I'd love to take a cruise and even work on one, why not. A system like an airline steward, to work and travel.

Things are looking bad for those who work without a permit in Miami, and as luck would have it, the day after I stopped working at the restaurant there was an immigration raid on all the venues in Miami Beach, fining or jailing the undocumented for a week and consequently fining the owner of the establishment. I had already decided to leave; I didn't get on well with my Cuban colleagues, never a smile, no dialogue. And yet I earned well, especially in tips.

In America there exists a system for transporting cars from one place to another in the USA that is as unique as it is rare. If someone from New York goes on holiday for a month in Florida and would like his car there, he doesn't set about driving it for 4 days and wouldn't ship it either, too expensive; so he hands it to an agency, which is tasked with finding someone reliable willing to drive it to its destination. And that's where I come in. I didn't have a precise destination, so I asked that agency for the most beautiful car they had to deliver and where it had to be taken, and so with a photocopy of my passport and a $200 deposit, they gave me a luxurious new 5000cc Nissan Maxima to deliver within a week to Denver, Colorado.

And so the next morning, in the company of a German guy, we set off, taking turns at the wheel and making various stops: Orlando, New Orleans, Wichita and finally Denver. We split the cost of petrol, which is sold by the gallon and not by the litre, and in doing so we saw a bit of America. The German then went skiing at Aspen in the Rocky Mountains, while I, after delivering the car to its owner in good condition, got my $200 deposit back.

I looked for a job in a restaurant and found one straight away. Genuine Italians are sought after in Italian restaurants. A shame, though, that the hostel where I was staying was 2 buses away from the restaurant on the way there and 2 on the way back, with the cold always below zero at the bus stops, and on top of that the pay was much lower than in Miami. So I only stayed a short time and decided that the cold wasn't for me.

Toshi, a friendly Japanese guy from Okinawa whom I met at the hostel, agreed to come with me on a driveaway back to Florida, so we took another car to deliver; it was a red Oldsmobile to be taken to Tampa in Florida.

Toshi and I set off in the evening, lengthening the route a bit under the snow (he was seeing it for the first time in his life) to go and see the legendary Las Vegas. At a certain point, tired of driving, around 2 in the morning we parked at the edge of a petrol station and lowered the seats and slept.

In the morning, with daylight, we found the car totally covered in snow. What a blast. He was overjoyed; Okinawa is tropical and it never snows there.

Arriving a few hours later in Las Vegas, we had a look around, and then continued east. And in a week, amid snowstorms and several near-skids off the road on the ice, we finally reached warm Florida and returned the car. The whole time I got on well with Toshi, who spoke a charming English.

Then he went back to California while I returned to Miami, before setting off for the Caribbean and South America.

Bye