Life in the twins
Condolences to all the people in Bombay who died in the blasts today. May we pray for peace in this world? Incidentally, Syd Barrett of pink floyd called it his day too. May we pray for more crack and weed in this world.
Sorry to have to write on this day. It’s been a hectic month with all these new developments happening around me. I started my first official job ever, if you don’t account for the several part-time jobs that included lifting chairs and tables with weird men and beer bottles or the full-time research assistant position that just paid my beer and living expenses. This is also the first time I am living in a city beyond the latitude of 45 degrees that reaches a record min temperature among the biggest cities in the United States, if the Minneapolis were a big city.
I hardly knew the existence of this city until I got my job and planned my move. Apparently, this is the city that bears the headquarters for 15 of the fortune 500 companies including the company I work for. I spare you all with the rest of the fun facts of Minneapolis today and get straight down to the business of explaining the events of the past month or so.
In a matter of 3 weeks I visited three continents and countries, 12 cities and 7 states. Not too much for a regular business traveler. It’s just that I expected the vacation to be relaxing and the job to be stressful and not vice versa. But things are expected to pick up at work this week when I would officially start getting a few strands of grey hair and facial stress-wrinkles to closely resemble a middle-aged Indian man who doesn’t satisfy his wife in bed. Added to all this, I also had the tension of whether or not I will clear the drug test for no apparent reason. This indulged me in a behavior of taking no oral allopathic medicines even when the situation was dire in the restrooms that were the natural symptoms of suffering the last few days in India from diarrhea and dysentery. I was just scared that the drug test might show positive results for something as simple as Tylenol. Besides I was just worried about the 5% error in drug tests assuming that I would fall in that category. But all turned out fine.
Minneapolis is a fun city and has a pretty chill downtown with a lot of educated young people around even though you don’t need to be educated to be fun; in fact, it’s most often vice versa which is what makes Minneapolis a unique place to live. St. Paul is the sister city and they are generally referred to as the twin cities/metro area to include all the neighboring cities to come up with a sizable figure of about 1 million in comparison to some of the bigger cities in the country which are all peanuts in comparison to the population of India. The downtown in Minneapolis surprisingly (considering how much importance is given to soccer in this country) has a lot of bars that showed the world cup soccer matches. But I was in no mood to watch it at the bars and sadly my TV hadn’t arrived from Ann arbor before the finals so I had to end up following the scores online and reading the text by the minute. They even covered the racial slurs exchanged between materazzi and zidane. It was still shocking to see Zidane end his world cup career in such an unprofessional manner. It was also disheartening to see the world cup finals end in a shoot out.
I was recently introduced to a Thursday happy hours list for which I attended on time in desperation to make some new friends only ending up listening to a bunch of MBA grads talk about their accounting and finance classes that they had taken fours years ago. But it was definitely fun to hang out with random people and to learn what was appropriate and not appro to talk in a group.
This is the city of ten thousand lakes so you can pretty much find water bodies and a million mosquitoes hanging around streets and boulevards you enter which is why most Minnesotans are known to be introverts. But culture is slowly changing with more and more humans replacing mosquitoes and a growing number of Asians cooking them with soy sauce for dinner (It must be challenge to eat them with chopsticks though. Although I did hear the Chinese are considering eating their hands, sorry with their hands, now that there is a serious problem with the availability of wood in china).
Anyway coming back to life in Minneapolis, I think I have a pretty good idea of what it is like to live alone in an apartment and I am ready to get a room mate but unfortunately I have signed up for a one year lease so I guess I will have to make the best with what I have i.e., dirty thoughts, a bed and a laptop! Oh btw, I was referring to working. More from me soon.
Sorry to have to write on this day. It’s been a hectic month with all these new developments happening around me. I started my first official job ever, if you don’t account for the several part-time jobs that included lifting chairs and tables with weird men and beer bottles or the full-time research assistant position that just paid my beer and living expenses. This is also the first time I am living in a city beyond the latitude of 45 degrees that reaches a record min temperature among the biggest cities in the United States, if the Minneapolis were a big city.
I hardly knew the existence of this city until I got my job and planned my move. Apparently, this is the city that bears the headquarters for 15 of the fortune 500 companies including the company I work for. I spare you all with the rest of the fun facts of Minneapolis today and get straight down to the business of explaining the events of the past month or so.
In a matter of 3 weeks I visited three continents and countries, 12 cities and 7 states. Not too much for a regular business traveler. It’s just that I expected the vacation to be relaxing and the job to be stressful and not vice versa. But things are expected to pick up at work this week when I would officially start getting a few strands of grey hair and facial stress-wrinkles to closely resemble a middle-aged Indian man who doesn’t satisfy his wife in bed. Added to all this, I also had the tension of whether or not I will clear the drug test for no apparent reason. This indulged me in a behavior of taking no oral allopathic medicines even when the situation was dire in the restrooms that were the natural symptoms of suffering the last few days in India from diarrhea and dysentery. I was just scared that the drug test might show positive results for something as simple as Tylenol. Besides I was just worried about the 5% error in drug tests assuming that I would fall in that category. But all turned out fine.
Minneapolis is a fun city and has a pretty chill downtown with a lot of educated young people around even though you don’t need to be educated to be fun; in fact, it’s most often vice versa which is what makes Minneapolis a unique place to live. St. Paul is the sister city and they are generally referred to as the twin cities/metro area to include all the neighboring cities to come up with a sizable figure of about 1 million in comparison to some of the bigger cities in the country which are all peanuts in comparison to the population of India. The downtown in Minneapolis surprisingly (considering how much importance is given to soccer in this country) has a lot of bars that showed the world cup soccer matches. But I was in no mood to watch it at the bars and sadly my TV hadn’t arrived from Ann arbor before the finals so I had to end up following the scores online and reading the text by the minute. They even covered the racial slurs exchanged between materazzi and zidane. It was still shocking to see Zidane end his world cup career in such an unprofessional manner. It was also disheartening to see the world cup finals end in a shoot out.
I was recently introduced to a Thursday happy hours list for which I attended on time in desperation to make some new friends only ending up listening to a bunch of MBA grads talk about their accounting and finance classes that they had taken fours years ago. But it was definitely fun to hang out with random people and to learn what was appropriate and not appro to talk in a group.
This is the city of ten thousand lakes so you can pretty much find water bodies and a million mosquitoes hanging around streets and boulevards you enter which is why most Minnesotans are known to be introverts. But culture is slowly changing with more and more humans replacing mosquitoes and a growing number of Asians cooking them with soy sauce for dinner (It must be challenge to eat them with chopsticks though. Although I did hear the Chinese are considering eating their hands, sorry with their hands, now that there is a serious problem with the availability of wood in china).
Anyway coming back to life in Minneapolis, I think I have a pretty good idea of what it is like to live alone in an apartment and I am ready to get a room mate but unfortunately I have signed up for a one year lease so I guess I will have to make the best with what I have i.e., dirty thoughts, a bed and a laptop! Oh btw, I was referring to working. More from me soon.
posted by Mt. Heaven at 12:51 PM
1 Comments:
glad you finally made it, safe and at least somewhat sound :) we miss you here in A2.
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