Here today, Gone ... (?)

I've been in US for about a week now and I think I should be writing something about that. Sadly though, I don't really have any big insights or observations to mention about leaving the country, coming to a new one or problems of a 'legal alien entitled to work'; so I'll just have to do with some riff-raff.

My first observation about a foreign country, made from an airborne view of the city of Milan (which is all I saw of it, apart from its airport), was that everything was amazingly geometrical. Fields were perfect rectangles, houses made neat patterns, roads either ran in a straight line or curved in perfect circles or arcs, all in sharp contrast to the chaos of any Indian landscape. The next thing which struck me, once I got to US, was the huge amount of space everywhere - in cars, on roads, besides the roads, in houses, everything is big and roomy. Even the vegetables are supersize! I've been lucky in that I've had a fairly smooth transition so far, I guess its an advantage of working - the company pays for everything. There are also lots of very nice and helpful people around, infact all the people I've come across so far are just extremely polite, and punctual!

Another highlight of the one week here so far has been the trip to DC and the sighting of a giant panda in the national park there. There wasn't really anything very exciting about it, since the pandas were just lazily walking around and they weren't even pristine white as I imagined them (their behinds, which were all I got to see, had become a muddy brown from sitting on their bums all the time), but I'm just glad I got to see a panda. I also saw a giraffe which had to stoop with great difficulty everytime to eat, because for some weird reason all the trees in its enclosure, tall enough for it to reach comfortably, had been fenced in. I think I must've been less than 10 years old, the last time I went to a zoo in India. Of more grown-up interest was the jewellery display in the Natural History Museum. I'm not much of a jewellery person, but I could tell that those were some fine pieces.

I haven't been able to read much since I got here. I did borrow a book by Kurt Vonnegut and it seems to be the more common type of science fiction, in contrast to the other books by him I've read so far. Its one of his earlier books I think. Hopefully, will finish it this weekend and move on to something else.