When you grow up somewhere in the world other than America, you hear many stories about how great America is. When I was a little girl, I heard that America was a country where all dreams come true, and I imagined that everything was perfect in America – people looked like movie stars, they were beautifully dressed, they were friendly, rich, and happy.

You could buy anything you wanted in the stores; the service was flawless, and it was absolutely impossible to find a rotten apple in the supermarket. In my mind, America was a paradise!

Years later, in January of 1995, there I was on a plane that was coming in for landing at JFK Airport. New York City! I pressed my face against the window. Below me was the city I had imagined since childhood, the America where, according to everyone back home, dreams always came true.

Even though I knew about America a little bit more at that time, still, my knowledge came only from the books of great American authors, like Theodore Dreiser, Hemingway, and Mark Twain, from Hollywood movies and the news.

You might as well have told me I was going to the moon. It seemed just as far and just as foreign – and I worked for the Foreign Service. It never came to my mind that one day I could be appointed to work in America.

But here I was, getting my bags at JFK… I was going to work at the Consulate General of Lithuania in New York. It was my first trip to America ever. As I was standing at the baggage carousel, the strange sounds and smells of New York slipping in through the doors as people came and went. I didn’t know where I would be living, and I didn’t even know what a hot dog was. If someone asked me at that time what a hot dog was, I would have probably guessed that it was a sick dog that had a fever. In other words, I didn’t know anything at all. All I knew was that my colleagues would be picking me up at the airport and explaining the rest as we went.