Work trip to Atlanta and Philadelphia, USA - 12th to 15th January 2009

A two-stop trip to the USA, taking in a city I'd never been to before in Atlanta. Right down in the south of the US, I was expecting lazy drawling sentences, and food that had enough cholesterol to kill you if you even just looked at it.

When the plane landed at the huge Atlanta airport (the busiest in the world), the large queue at immigration was not a surprise. There were a lot of people (which does tend to cause queues), and judging by the immigration officer I saw, they do not exactly employ the brightest minds down south. As I was waiting in the queue, a plane load of soldiers was arriving - as they walked through the immigration hall, there was a spontaneous round of applause - something one would never see anywhere except the USA.

Despite lots of fanfare about them moving to an electronic travel authorisation (of which the day I arrived was the first day), I still had to fill in the annoying green visa waiver form. This did leave me wondering what the point of the switch was - it presumably creates some convenience for the US authorities, at the cost of extra hassle for travellers.

After all the waiting and hassle of immigration, we were then made to go through security to get OUT of airport! Atlanta is a huge connection hub, so I suppose the majority of people arriving on international flights would need to clear security anyway - and I guess they think its easier just to make everybody do it. But when you have just got off a 9 hour flight, and just want to get out of the airport, it is absolutely the last thing you need! After security, you then have to take a 6 stop train journey to get to a place where cabs pick up - a truly huge, but rather inconvenient and unfriendly airport.

Atlanta itself is a car city, a bit like LA, so there are plenty of freeways with 8 lanes in each direction. On the approach to the city, it has a typical US city skyline - a few distinct "signature" skyscrapers, plus lots of other generic tall buildings. But because of the sprawl, and the fact that it is built for cars, the centre of the city is pretty dead - especially after 6pm. That makes it a weird place to be staying - after all the office workers go home, the area is inhabited just by lonely people on business trips! Because you need a car to get about (despite the excellent subway system, everybody seems to use a car - the subway was empty when I went on it), walking the pavements is a lonely thing to do - there is absolutely nobody walking around the city.

My Atlanta hotel was the huge Marriott Marquis, which, as with many of the city's landmark buildings, looked like it was built around the time of the 1996 Olympics. It had a huge atrium which looked like a massive ribcage, going right the way up to the top of the building. But, being January, there being a recession, and the Olympics not being in town at the time; the place was very empty. Apparently a lot of the big hotels in town are like that - they built lots of capacity for when the whole world came to visit for the Olympics; but the world hasn't seemed to be too interested in coming back since.

All in all, my experience of Atlanta wasn't great - one of the big advantages seems to be the hot weather, which wasn't especially evident in the second week of January. If you have a car, I'm sure things are more entertaining, but Atlanta did not seem like one of the better cities in the USA - far from it in fact - a somewhat soulless place, with an eerily quiet city centre.

After a couple of days in Atlanta, I flew to more familiar territory - Philadelphia. When I landed, and during my 24 hours there, the temperature didn't get above -10C the whole time. It was so extremely cold that it was just funny - although the lack of wind meant that it could have been a whole lot worse. I was only in Philly for a day or so, but after Atlanta, it was comfortingly familiar. This will be my last trip to the US for a few months - a shame, as I like Philadelphia more every time I visit.