Life in the US

Hiya folks! Its been a long time since I blogged...probably cos I was busy adding numerous layers of fat while I was at home for 3 months! Now that I am in the US, and I finally have a laptop I was like hey, lets start blabbing again.

Ok, so before coming here I was like- "Wow! I am finally going to the US of A!" and everyone around me was behaving as if I was gonna go to a different planet! Well, I have been here for a little over 2 weeks and let me tell you, life is not that different.

Everyone is polite here. Now that is something weird when you come here the first time. Especially if you have roamed around in Mumbai where people only have time to curse you.

Vehicles stop when you want to cross the road! This is again a bit scary cos a line of vehicles is waiting for you to cross the road!

Now a bit about the place where I am. I am staying in this real small city(lol) called Goleta. Its a city of 10,000 people. I am sure there are housing societies in India with more ;)

Goleta is actually kind of like a small, rich village. Everyone either has a car- or a bike! That is probably cos we're close to UCSB. One more crazy thing- bikes with gears are cheaper than bikes without them! And if you accidentally call a bike a cycle- you are bound to get no response (it happened to me in Kmart,hehe)


Some things are still different for me. I haven't yet got used to seeing vehicles drive on the right. Every time I am waiting to cross at an intersection, I would think-"That vehicle would turn left" and then it wouldn't and I would be stumped! Guess it would take a while for my tiny little brain to get adjusted to.

And ya, we simply HAVE to cook here. Eating out on a regular basis is pretty expensive, especially if you involuntarily end up converting dollars to rupees. Luckily one roomie of mine is a Gujju, so he got tons of masalas :) The tough part is using them.

As I am in Southern California, the weather is pretty much the same as that in India. In fact its been really hot for the past few days. Nights are pretty cool.

A bit about the university. UCSB is a beautiful campus. Its surrounded by beaches and mountains on all sides! You have to watch out for bikes rather than cars! Loads of skateboarders too. There is a beach right opposite my department!

We got our memberships in Costco & Albertsons (departmental chains here). We are still in the process of setting up our apartment. We had to buy and fix our own tubelights(called fluorescents here :) ) And well, we gotta laze some time too! This is currently my ~amazing~ life here!