It has been quite a while since I sat down to write about all that has been happening around me. After a pleasant stay at Pradeep's place, I moved into my apartment at Oak Tree a week ago.
The Friday before the last one was my first day out. Puja took me around the place, helped me open a bank account and also showed me into the department. I got started with filling some tax and payroll forms and understanding the health insurance schemes, which is a highly debated issue in the US Senate these days. We had a nice East African lunch of lentils, rice and aaloo gravy at State street. The lakeside in Madison is beautiful and typical weekdays see families and students in the town come over to the Memorial Union and hang out over food and drinks. I met one of my roommates, Sankar, and had a nice time walking around the place. We also went to our present apartment and checked it out. It looked pretty comfortable and, apart from a few niggles, a good place to spend the first year.
I shifted to Oak tree at noon on Sunday and met my apartment mates Sriram and Vinod as well. Sri is a grad student in Mathematics and is in love with his subject. He works on an area that a lot of people fear to venture into and has us in splits with his tales of a certain Indian friend, whom I shall not name here. Vinod is getting thinner by the hour and I am certain he will vanish into thin air on the way to his workplace. Currently, he is trying to scale up his evening meal from two rotis to three.
We shopped for groceries in the evening. In this place, people shop at a huge scale and in a manner completely different from what we are used to in India. Almost everyone shops in huge malls that are far away from the city centre. The neighbourhood shops are expensive and do not stock up a lot`of stuff. So, the system encourages you to spend a lot and stock up things in the refrigerator. Also, most locals and some international students have cars and very few people take the bus, which, I am told, is one of the best services in all of the United States. So, you see, the system encourages you to buy cars. The concept of fresh vegetables is nowhere to be seen. What is frozen is considered fresh. A huge contrast from the neighbourhood subzi-wallah that we have back home.
The supermarkets have an awesome variety of everything - pizzas, fruits, veggies, milk products (Wisconsin is the milk state of the US, btw), health foods, plastics, etc. I guess this is what impresses a newcomer about this country, though it can also be pretty bugging when you are asked to choose from a set of ten different colours for your debit card!
We hogged on an a delicious meal of aaloo-matar, roti and rajma-chaval.
The Friday before the last one was my first day out. Puja took me around the place, helped me open a bank account and also showed me into the department. I got started with filling some tax and payroll forms and understanding the health insurance schemes, which is a highly debated issue in the US Senate these days. We had a nice East African lunch of lentils, rice and aaloo gravy at State street. The lakeside in Madison is beautiful and typical weekdays see families and students in the town come over to the Memorial Union and hang out over food and drinks. I met one of my roommates, Sankar, and had a nice time walking around the place. We also went to our present apartment and checked it out. It looked pretty comfortable and, apart from a few niggles, a good place to spend the first year.
I shifted to Oak tree at noon on Sunday and met my apartment mates Sriram and Vinod as well. Sri is a grad student in Mathematics and is in love with his subject. He works on an area that a lot of people fear to venture into and has us in splits with his tales of a certain Indian friend, whom I shall not name here. Vinod is getting thinner by the hour and I am certain he will vanish into thin air on the way to his workplace. Currently, he is trying to scale up his evening meal from two rotis to three.
We shopped for groceries in the evening. In this place, people shop at a huge scale and in a manner completely different from what we are used to in India. Almost everyone shops in huge malls that are far away from the city centre. The neighbourhood shops are expensive and do not stock up a lot`of stuff. So, the system encourages you to spend a lot and stock up things in the refrigerator. Also, most locals and some international students have cars and very few people take the bus, which, I am told, is one of the best services in all of the United States. So, you see, the system encourages you to buy cars. The concept of fresh vegetables is nowhere to be seen. What is frozen is considered fresh. A huge contrast from the neighbourhood subzi-wallah that we have back home.
The supermarkets have an awesome variety of everything - pizzas, fruits, veggies, milk products (Wisconsin is the milk state of the US, btw), health foods, plastics, etc. I guess this is what impresses a newcomer about this country, though it can also be pretty bugging when you are asked to choose from a set of ten different colours for your debit card!
We hogged on an a delicious meal of aaloo-matar, roti and rajma-chaval.
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