After 24 years long stay at home, the pampered kid steps out of home. With no prior experience of staying outside home, even for a week lands directly in Milwaukee (US). You could imagine !!!
When I came here in November, the winter had already started..it was getting colder and colder day by day. I was very proud of myself at least for a day, that I was lucky enough to get a chance to travel onsite to the US. This was dream for me to come true, from a long time inf act even before I joined my engineering. All thanks to my Project Manager Reema..
My travel to the US made me learn lot of new things...be it technical, professional or personal. I am a strong believer of this statement "Necessity is the mother of invention". When I was at home I dint realise the importance of preparing food, keeping my room clean or infact even grocery shopping :)). Let alone cooking I dint even know that we had to use cooking oil to cook most of the dishes...
For the first one month I had a colleague of mine ShriHari who had apparently become one of my good friends, staying with me. I was very to happy to stay with him because I realised that I was better than him...coz he dint even know how to cook rice!!!
By the time I could settle down and realise what work exactly was expected out of me one month flew past...Since I knew driving right from India, driving in US was really tough! Trust me you are better of not knowing to drive when you come to US...its very easy to drive a car in US since there is no gear and everybody follows the rules...but for me it took around 1 month to get set to the rules here..By this time ShriHari left for India
After 1 month of stay with him I moved to another colleagues room Abhinay and become one more additional roommate..There were 2 guys staying with him already Siva, Avik and I was the fourth guy to join. Slowly I started learning how to prepare food (not cook) being with Abhinay...he was the HOD for all house related activities including cooking. Being with Abhi I started moving around..got to know Bhuvi, Uday, Manoj and quite a few people...
All of us Avik, Abhi, Siva and me were all unique characters each one having different thinking! :) We had a blasting time in Monetary Apartment...like going out for movies, late night drives, one of them a really long drive to NY which was around 900 miles...
Each one of us lived here like kings playing loud music late night and were given warning to vacate the apartments a quite a few times...well...there were other reasons for that too, Avik had a bought a mattress from GoodWill that screwed us royally, the reason being it had bedbugs..
I guess none of us knew about bedbugs when in India and here in the US we had a Pest inspection done on our apartment all of a sudden and fined 300$ for having bedbugs...Welcome to US!!!
Everybody were nearing the end of their assignment by now, as the days progressed. Avik was the first guy to vacate the room to go to India. There were 2 long weekends in between and I managed to squeeze a trip to my cousin's home in California and NY. My trip to California was just awesome..i would need to write a new blog for it..
The second guy to move was Siva, we used to call him maama since he was lucky enough to have the maximum number of speeding tickets...
I never had problems making friends and made quite a few friends... The summer time had started by then and I started playing cricket played a couple of tournament matches as well..I would go to Bhuvi's house almost all Friday evenings for dinner, shamelessly :) He cooks awesome food...
Uday and Lori also would host a party quite often and I would go there also even if he had not invited me :). I enjoyed their company..he has an amazing house with 2 pretty cats, 2 dogs, a fire place in the garden....We used to sit by the fire in open air in garden with pets moving around....it was just awesome...somebody like me could not have asked for anything more...
The time just kept moving...
Abhi also left for India, and I had to find a new place to live...Luckily/ Unluckily I came across a guy who was very new to US...direct from some village in Andhra :) who apparently become my roommate.
Well now this is the time when I started learning how to prepare food... this guy dint even know cooking and was fully dependent on me to cook. If I dint cook he would eat plain rice with some powders that he had got from Andhra!
I started making some south Indian dishes like vangibath, puliogare, rasam etc reading the directions written at the back :)... It was not tasty but it was better than eating rice with some powder!!!
I had a cousin of mine Prashanth visit me from Connecticut and we moved around Chicago/Niagara and quite a few places...I enjoyed his company too...also did the skydive with him... a lifetime experience one...
The time just kept moving...I have made good friends here...have known to tackle problems...be all by myself...when I am all set now and confident that I can survive in US independently..its time for me to go back.. I have started shopping gifts for all my relatives and friends...I have a mixed feeling to go back to India
Well..I guess I would get this opportunity again, but it looks like the chances are bleak..
The next time I land in US, i think it is going to be a different chapter again :)
I hope I dint bore you with this blog..This is my first blog and all comments are welcome!
Bye
Vinu
18 comments:
Arre wah!!! This is awesome yaar ... It's laughable thinking of you and Shri Hari trying to cook and you being better .. lolz ..
And yea.. bedbugs are one royal problem out here .. cant believe, these bloody insects can come and kip on my bed. (thankfully, i haven't had a bedbug prob yet), and here, once a month, they come to fumigate our apartments, so basically that's good.
when will u be going bak? wish i cud meet up some time, but i am not able to move my body beyond the virtual confines of my home and my department.
but imagine, ur family wud be suprised and shocked to see the New YOU. U will probably insist on cooking at home now :-) and when someone cooks differently, u can give a whole gyan on how to do it properly... hehe .. the wonders of newly-gained knowledge
in a nutshell, brilliant first post.. had a good laugh reading it. waiting for more of ur posts!
Hey Vinu! Too cool man! So proud of you!
Man....It is True.....When I saw First time Autograph Movie....was feeling who theft my story......Yeah But these things helps us to understand....What is our famliy and frineds with whom we stayed for almost 25 years.....
Wow, What a blog!Pampered kid becoming a pucca cook! Give us more. Keep blogging, Vinu.
maga super blog! by the way, my guess is that u would better leave the kitchen for your mom when you are back in India!
goood one .... so u now know u can survive on urr own ...that accounts for somethinn man... esp in a totally different country were everythin seems different an new...
Hey Vinu,
you have put important events of your one year's stay at US in nutshell and it is realy nice. You may have add some more wrt your visits to religious/spiritual places in USas well.
Vinu,
Thanks for sharing your US story... I am sure you have just scratched the surface. Before you leave the US, I want to hear you say the Terminator's dialog: "I'll be BAACK!!" Hopefully, you'll return early next year and live in Southern California at which point the Rao family will start featuring prominently in your 2009BLOG entries!!! Good Luck and hope to see you soon.
dude... gets your facts correct... the bedbugs chapter cost us 360 $ (who better can re-collect the exact amount than who actually shelled it out !!!)
Another thing worth mentioning here is Vinayaka's role as a 'homemaker' started with cleaning dishes, but soon he realized that cooking is probably the easier option. So one fine day he got some on-job KT from Bhuvi on how to prepare aloo-curry & that day onwards for the next 4 months it was aloo-curry all the way - almost everyday when he cooked ! Looks like things have changed for the good in the last few months......
Well US experience for all 4 of us had been really great..... lucky nf to find great company to hang with....
Vinu, your post brought back the memories of our life in US specially @ Monterey Appts.... keep blogging....
Hey Vinayaka ..Great to read your experience in US ..Now when you come back we can expect dabba by you which is cooked by you:-)
Enjoy!
- Reema
(Also this Id is in my daughters name )
Hey Vinu,
Its nice to see your experiences on paper. I thought there will be one sentence about my cooking and Bade mamaa's :-( but you disappointed me. Thanks for mentioning my character as "mamaa". Anyways, it was a pleasure we roomies staying at Monterey Apartments. We all had lots of fun together. Those were the best days of my life ...
Hey this is good blog for a start Vinayak but hold ur excitement and blog shorter one's next time :) took me a while to finish this....
So u ve also joined the BLOG bandwagon!! :) great.. welcome aboard..all that u missed to tell over phone i cud find it here ;-)
but dont be like me.. blog more frequently ok.. :)
I must really thank you for the athithi satkar maga...It was as if i stayed at my in-laws' place...I can never forget the way you religiously followed the "Directions for Use" behind all the MTR packs...measuring 300 ml of water so carefully and mentally making exact measurements for every ingredient...Best part was appreciating the taste and patting your own back at the dinner table (honestly, the taste was good enough to please a girl to marry you)...I was equally happy as you were, to realize that being a long term(I expected you to have mastered the art of cooking-for survival tho)you were experimenting in front of me (rather on me...lol)It was royal fun...i can never forget the innumerable drives in your car where i held the GPS (and often guided u wrong!!)...awesome post re mama...keep going...
Awesome maga. You have a great future (and an alternate career option) as a story teller. Nostalgic :). How come there is no word about 'Over The Border' escapades ;)
And I can vouch for your 'exp outside home' from the Savvion training trip to Hyd and your first beer tasting ceremony :-))
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