The United States of America
I came to the USA on 21st of May 21012. It has
been 3 months now and a little more. I thought I ought to write about my
experience and my impression of the way of life here, the people , the food and
the places I have travelled to and the general way in which things function
here.
Most of the things that I have to say are positive. This may
sound like I am being critical of my home country. But I wouldn’t want to be a
judge of that. It is merely admiration that systems can function and be
successful if a collective society adopts and implements it.
The first impression I had of things “abroad” was
efficiency. It started at the London airport where I had a connecting flight
between India and US. Scores of people yet our line kept moving and we were
done with processes in minutes. This efficiency whether in terms of services or
traffic is addictive, so much so when a maintenance guy is an hour late , or if
two cars block lanes on either side of your lane ( on a 6 lane highway) you
start to lose patience. That makes these people highly impatient which is why
services are so prompt so as to avoid negative reviews and customer ire.
I was impressed by the wide roads and signs and the sheer
magnificence of the traffic system. Public transport is prompt and on time. It is
clean and maintained really well.
Food here is so varied. From American to Mexican to
chinese to indian to Italian. Several cuisines.
What is interesting is just about any dish can be turned into a speciality
restaurant , so we would have a salad shop, or a sandwich shop, or a shop with
different flavoured yogurt, a coffee shop, bread shop, and things like that.
The people here are of
different flavours as we would have in any place. The weirdest thing
they do is always acknowledge your presence. I think if you don’t they take it
as being rude. I took it as a positive thing to do, to show kindness and
respect for a fellow human, but W has an opposing view saying that blurting out
a sorry or thank you to any and every person causes the integrity of those
words to be lost. Both views do make sense and I cannot decide on which one to
latch on to. But I do know it would be weird if I didn’t say a thank you to a
bus driver here in Atlanta and if I did say a thank you to a bus driver in
India, not that I haven’t EVER said it, to a driver or a conductor, but only
unless I knew them and they really did do something worth thanking for. It is
difficult to put this in words, because at this point in time I am trying to rationalize
and counter argue points that people would raise wrt this norm.
This is all I am going to write at this moment. I did not
want to elaborate here because I intended to write about every topic in detail.
Doing that here would only lengthen the post and would be too much information
in one go.
As of now I would like to cover them under the following
brief topics.
Roads
Traffic and traffic sense
People
Public Transport
Food
Common courtesies
Tourist Attractions
Food
I may group certain topics if I
find fit may add subsequent topics as I find them interesting or simply change
the name of the topic depending on the output of my thoughts and observations
and what they lead to. So long for now.. J
