A few things.....

Actually a lot of things have happened since monday, i.e. about 5 days back. I would report briefly on those 'things' below...

Silent Movies: I had my first experience of watching silent movies at 30,000 ft asl. I mean, I never realised how predictable a storyline could be until Lufthansa dished out them movies 'muted'.

Erratic sleeping: I have slept at real vague times..you know night outs or all nighters..6 am, 10 am and maybe even 9 pm the next day..But how about 5 pm or 7 pm...I don't remember doing that in the past decade..And getting up at 1 am..What do you do when you fall into such situation..Like if it were 4:30 am , I might have thought about umm..uh..umm..the american slang or umm..you know..umm the way I need to speak out here to be heard..But yeah, so, ok what does one do when one gets up at 1 am and try as hard you can't sleep 'cause you have slept already for 8 hrs?
Well, Seattle isn't an easy place to get around atleast for an incoming grad like me, so what you do is look at the maps..yeah simple..you have the university map, you have the north seattle, east, west..and you have the metro bus map..So yeah that took up some of my time..But then I kept looking at my watch and finally I couldn't take it any more..So at 3 am I took off for a jaunt out..walking..without much winter wear..must have been 5-8 degrees or 45 F...But I guess it was worth the view of the union lake and the boats in glistening night lights right beside the place I am put up right now.


Running:
So after that sleeping thing and the walking thing on wednesday morning, I went out for the running thing...in the rain...but it was fun and I got to know the neighbourhood a little better... and yeah I had my first experience of a frost bite..unmistakable..despite the winter gear I had..A good 25 minutes..must say seattle has quite a few hills and big ones at that...
I ran today morning too, but it wasn't good probably because I slept through my dinner yesterday night..


Culture shock:
You come out of the Sea-Tac airport and what do you see? .............................................................Yeah open space. I mean the population of Seattle is 500,000 and washington state 5.85 million and how do you compare that with back in India..Well, Chennai is 6.5 million thereabouts...so there you go..a mere 20 square mile city having a population equivalent to a 300 square mile state...But I am beginning to take in the beauty of the emerald city.

Every one's got a car..I knew that before I came here, ofcourse, but it didn't hit me till I saw them here..And the car-pool lane is empty!! I mean you would think, with the heavy traffic during peak hours, people would switch to car-pool big time..Well that's not the case..So yeah people here are pretty individualistic..I am not saying that's bad..but I am not saying that's good either..

Standard..Things are pretty much standard..no chaos..that's good, well planned cities..great!!! But the same deodorant odour from pretty much every one you pass by..? and the same smell from any restaurant round the corner..?
But there is diversity in the uwash district with lots of people in from different countries like china, vietnam, etc and yeah the multitude of restaurants representing different countries on the university ave..

Food: It wasn't a struggle from day one, thanks to my good-natured host, who did a good job keeping me well fed. But I brought out my latent cooking skills to the fore by preparing a mixed vegetable noodles for breakfast today..And that was pretty much the same thing I had at Mangolia for lunch..pretty cheap and you can take home what you didn't eat..which was about 75% of what I had filled up my bowl with..So tomorrow's lunch is well taken care off..

Cycling:
I realised after two days of walking to and fro from the house to the university, that transportation of some form is indispensible with. And since Seattle is biker and walker friendly( the other day I was standing at an intersection without a signal..and I was about to cross the road but I cross checked the map to see if I was headed in the right direction and this car a few feet away starts honking..I don't understand what's going on..I was not blocking the way..the woman in the car frantically signalled me to get across..back in India that's unheard of..so yeah pretty walker friendly), I thought it better to get the bike..since I am psychologically not ok with walking long distance, though ironically, that's not the case with running. The search for a good and cheap road bike wasn't easy..I checked out 'recyled cycles' a couple of times, but they said that the second hand bikes come in and are bought out pretty soon..Since I didn't have the time to wait there all day, I checked out 'Performance bikes', a neat store and they were having 'sales' so I opted for the 'Schwinn Fast-Back Sport 2006', a sleek, sexy red and black bike for about 450 $, a savings of 150$. Pretty costly, but a pretty good bike too. I had problems with the gear shifts initially, but then a couple of test rides and I was doing fine.

The Indian community: Probably not that big in the university here, there's not a single prof or student in my department here! But I met up with a few people here and that's enough for me..I would definitely look at getting some friends who come from across the globe including america though.