My way on the highway

Today we had a break from orientation. We have two days before class starts. On Sunday we have a picnic with the department. I hope it will be fun. Yesterday Gopika and Divya called up and made my day. It was so much fun talking to them. I was to go to georgia but tickets were a little too expensive. Well I am planning to definitely meet up with them before I go. What's the point of coming here otherwise? Hopefully when sriram comes something will work out. So today I took part in a psychology study and earned 20 bucks. I was so thrilled. GReat to make money to spend. we had to play two unbelievably simple and interesting games to play and earn the bucks. God it was good. Now that we earned the bucks we decided to spend it! So I had chinese food and my friend had indian . Mine sucked but hers was okay. This place called tech streets has trucks or mobile units which serve food. It sort of reminded me of PSG Tech back gate. Except there you get yummier things for 10 rupees rather tha...

This week has been great what with so much free food and great fun things to do. Today we started off with continental breakfast (yum yum) followed by sessions on thrifty living at CMU. It was really amazing. All the teaching staff here are by and large very articulate and extremely witty. The dean of student affairs, Dr. Paul Fowler was amzing. It was such fun listening to him. The Vice provost of CMU happens to be an Indian and she also spoke really well. She basically stressed on mixing with people and really enjoying what you're doing as this is the only time that you have to enjoy yourselves. She said "this is the break that you have from society and family obligations. So do this for yourselves". That was really very stimulating. In the afternoon we had a four course etiquette lunch. The first course was soup, second course salad, third course was lasange and the last course desert. We had an instructor who lead us thru the whole meal. To top it we had a desert fair...

I have not blogged for two days. This is what happened. On sunday I swam and played squash an sort of felt a little good because I got to do some physical exercise. Sunday night the indian student association organised an Independance day celebration. We painted a fence at CMU tricolored and just socialised with some Indian folks. There are a lot of Indians out here. We sort of form the majority of the International students. The sour point was that there was only cake and no free food:-( On monday our department called us for a welcome luncheon. It was really nice. The staff were very friendly and we had a good introduction to software engineering by one professor, Anthony. All the people here are very funny and extremely articulate. There is something to learn from that. Today is the first day of our International orientation. We reached here at 8:15 grabbed some doughnuts and coffee and had some good introduction about the US way of life. The OIE (office of International eductaion) ...

I am at CMU now and it still has not sunk in. School starts from tomorrow only, I mean the orientation. What strikes me after five days in America is that it is such a rich country and we are all really poor. I mean the cars, the roads, the malls, the houses etc. Everything is so big and massive. IT will take a while for India to get to that. No wonder we are called third world. It really makes no sense. Another peculiar thing is that there are only two sizes of people here either extremely fat or extremely fit. There are no in betweens. Everybody follows the rules and the houses look beautiful from the outside. I can understand why many Indians stay back here. They become slaves to all these material things. CMU is lovely. One thing I cannot understand is that the campus just spills onto the road. There is no compound wall. That is quite alien to somebody from India. People are quite friendly and helpful. Of course there are some people who are rude. But I think I've met only one...

I watched this movie morning raga yesterday. The promos of the movie looked so very nice. It also has some brilliant actors as a part of its star cast. The only problem was that the movie had a very flimsy story line except for the carnatic music part, the music is nothing. They could have done a lot more. Lillette Dubey and Perizaad and the lead actor are like actors in a bad play. Even I would be able to emote better. Shabana Azmi is the only one who is a little believable. I leave on moday and I have not started packing as yet. Amma needs to help to carry out the mission.