At CMU

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 such kind till now.
Yesterday we did some shopping. We had to get some basic stuff like milk, oil and groceries to get us started. So we went to walmart. It is an hours drive from here. It was quite funny what happened yesterday. We got up in the morning and decided to go to walmart. I felt it would be good to get a map of pittsbug. So I walked up to the AAA down my road and picked up a map.
Then on our way back to the apartment we stopped by at a gas station opposite our apartment and asked for directions to walmart. No one knew. Everyone knew where it was but no one was able to guide us. A man offered to show us the way if we followed him but we told him we had no car. The whole supermarket looked at us strangely as if we were from outer space. Even the person at AAA knew where waltmart was but could not exactly tell us directions. Its quite strange here. Nobody can give you exact directions. That somehow never happens in India. Then we got ourselves some bus schedules and then walked up to the bus stop. Thank God for us there was Indian girl there. She drew a map out for us and gave us directions to walmart. So we caught two buses and reached there. The ride was beautiful, thru tunnels and beautiful landscape. The buses here are so nice. Great seats and air conditioned. It was a good ride.
Walmart was like any department store in India something like a combination of Nilgiris and Lifestyles. They also sell clothes apart from grocery. I went mad after shopping there for three hours. We bought a month's groceries. It came upto about 44$ which I guess is fine because we will be splitting it by three:-) There was a whole row for mexican food. It was crazy and then another row for italian dressings, sauce and pasta. The pizza section was great but has presominantly non veg varieties. Yuck!! Icecreams oh my god. This huge tub, a bucket is 3$. Even in India it's not that cheap. Cheese is also cheap. But your heart aches to buy bread. Gosh it is quite scary!! Well we had around twenty bags and then had a blast carrying them around changing two buses. On the bus I met an Indian lady who was quite happy to see that I was tamilian and she spoke throughout the ride and gave us some inputs on how to cut costs.
For dinner we made pasta and potato stuffed bread and cheese. It was sinful and I felt really happy. It's a pity about how little it takes for me to get high! To combat that fat yesterday I got up at seven and jogged to CMU. It is about an 35 minutes walk. I am here now at the student cluster mailing and I hope to have a great day today.