Living and learning

A couple of days ago, my cousin sent me pictures of her apartment in a mid-west city. Her company has sent her "on-site" and this is her visit to the USA. As I looked at the pictures, a total feeling of deja-vu stole over me.

Circa 2001., my very first trip to the US. Only, back then, paper photos were very common. Within a week of landing in the US, I had bought a disposable camera, clicked pictures of my apartment as well as Davis from all possible angles, developed prints and dispatched them off home to India.

Based on my own experience, I bet within the next two weeks I am going to get more pictures from my cousin with captions like "Us in front of blah-blah building", "Me doing thingummyjig in Watsizname place" and so on :-)! Ah, been there, done that :-D!

Anyways, that got me thinking about a few of the interesting things that my friends and I did as first timers during the long process of adapting to a new country:

• Get totally into the spirit of cleaning. Pour water all over the bathroom floor. Only to realize that there is no outlet for the water to drain. Spend the next couple of hours manually mopping all the water up.
• Put aluminium foil inside microwave. And see a mini diwali take place inside the microwave.
• Have a bath in a bath-tub by just splashing water because couldn't figure out how to turn the darn shower on (turned out there was a ring around the water spout which needed to be pulled downward - seriously, does the average bather need to have a PhD in plumbing systems?)
• See a totally flat-topped cooking range in the kitchen while considering an apartment for rent. Anxiously ask apartment manager in concerned voice, "Oh, there is no stove! Do I need to buy my own stove?" And have the apartment manager say, "This is the stove!"
• Try to boil an egg in microwave. And see unboiled egg crack open in less than 10 seconds and ooze all the yolk out.
• Stand in the bus-stop, staring down the right side of the road, waiting for the bus to show up. And get startled when it arrives behind you, from the left side.
• Cook merrily in the kitchen for the first time and suddenly hear a strange continuous beeping sound. Have more experienced people in the house tell you that it is the smoke detector going off and that fanning the area beneath the detector would stop the beeps (having experienced people in the house when you hear the smoke alarm for the first time was a bonus. Otherwise copious blinking and confusion was guaranteed).

How many of these have you done and do you have more to add :-)?

Sign-off anecdote:

In Davis, a bunch of us had once gone for dinner to an Italian restaurant. All of us chose pasta entrees. These entrees came with a side. When the waitress came to take our orders, she asked each one of us "Soup or Salad?". Now, the waitress had a thick American accent and spoke pretty fast. When she got to R, this is how the conversation went.

Waitress (W): Soup or salad?

R (confidently): Yes, super salad.

W (confused): Would that be soup or salad?

R (confused too): Yes, I would like the super salad.

By then, the rest of us had grasped the situation. Evidently, R was hearing the options as either a yes or a no to having "Super Salad". While the waitress was hearing the menu options being repeated back to her. One of us could have helped out, but at that point, we were too busy clutching our stomachs and laughing. Finally, my friend S recovered enough to tell R, "She is asking you if you want a side of soup OR a side of salad." R then sheepishly told the waitress that he would take the soup.

Of course, after that incident, the rest of us always made it a point to solicitously ask R if he wanted to have "super salad" whenever we went out to eat :-)!

We speak only British English

The other day I was watching the movie 'Flavors' with friends (an aside: if you haven't watched the movie yet, do so! Its pretty funny and cool). In one of the scenes, one of the characters explains to an American woman that he can't follow her too well since he speaks and follows only "British English"! How true! When I landed up in the US for the first time, in spite of coming with the tag of "I speak good English", it was quite an experience interacting with the people here.

I had teamed up with two other future UC Davis students, E and F while coming here. We arrived in at the San Francisco airport and then took the airporter to Davis. We arrived at my apartment about 12.30a at night (yeah, I had already chosen my apartment and apartment-mates from India). The apartment manager was fortunately still up and helped us with our suitcases to my apartment. There, to my dismay, we found that the apartment was locked. Fortunately, we found a note from R (my future roomie) that she was out for a b'day party and would be back soon. Now we had the task of convincing the apartment manager that we weren't trespassers and that our arrival was anticipated.

So E, F and me explained that I was the 'Archana' mentioned in the note and that R was expecting me and that we would wait for her arrival. The apartment manager listened to us carefully for sometime and finally asked, "Do any of you speak English?" What!?!!! For goodness sake, we had been speaking in English :-(!

The next shock came when most of the people I spoke to said that I spoke too fast. Again, I was zapped. Whenever I watched American movies back in India, I used to think that all the American actors spoke way too fast and here they were accusing me of speaking too fast. Anyways, I slowed down a bit. Now, I had the pleasure of watching all the people staring intently at my lips while I spoke. They were basically trying to lip-read to comprehend what I was saying! Yikes!

Next came the pronounciation part. For some reason, whenever I said 'A', people heard it as 'E'. Similarly when I said 'T', people heard 'D'. Of course, I had to have a first name which has 3 A's in it. So, everytime I spelt out my name out for anyone, they would carefully write down 'ErchEnE'. I still have this problem. So, nowadays, I *always* spell out my name like "My name is Archana. A as in apple, R as in Robert..." and so on. It takes a while to finish spelling out, but at least I no longer get mail addressed to 'Erchene'.

All the above mentioned problems mostly happened with the native English speakers. For the people from other countries, since they themselves had their own brand of accents from their home-country, trying to decipher each other was a fun and mutually-challenging task. But, I soon found there were problems with that too.

UC Davis has a wide diversity among the grad students. However, the undergrad student population is almost completely made up of Americans or second-generation American descendants of non-Americans, especially Chinese. The latter group formed a huge bulk of the undergrad student population. As a Teaching Assistant (TA), I was assigned to teach C to freshers. My co-TA, S, was a fresh-off-the-boat Chinese guy. His English had a thick Chinese accent and I had a hard time understanding him. We both had to take "discussion" classes for the students to discuss homeworks and programming problems.

S's turn to teach came before mine did. I decided to sit through that class to see how he taught (and get tips). When he started teaching the class, I tried really hard to follow him. From what he wrote on the board, I knew he was covering all the essential concepts, but I could not follow much of what he actually spoke out. But, surprise, surprise - the students seemed to be following him. And I gleefully thought, if the students could follow his accented and broken English, they shouldn't have too much trouble with my accented but gramatically correct English.

So when I went for my first discussion class and started to teach, I looked around for signs of comprehension. Blank faces stared back from all corners. When the class got over, I was disappointed that I had gotten far fewer comprehending glances than S had got. I was beginning to doubt my explanation skills when it suddenly struck me. Most of these kids had Chinese parents. Most probably they were used to hearing a Chinese accent at home. While an Indian accent was a whole new ball game altogether. At the end of that quarter, guess who got the most number "I can't understand her" on their teaching-review?

Slowly though, I began to pick up the rules of speaking English the American way.Don't get me wrong here. For the life of me, I just CANNOT talk with an American accent. The only word I pronounce differently from the time I was in India is 'schedule'. And that's because the word crops up so often in conversations that it is easier to pronounce 'ske-dule' instead of confusing people with the Indian pronounciation. But - I have managed to pick up the intonation, tone and manner of speaking. So, if I speak slowly and enunciate the words clearly and follow the general American speaking pattern, people can understand me.

In UC Davis, by my third quarter, there was not even one "I can't understand her" on my teaching-review (hooray). And now that people could finally follow me, they were struck by the "good" English that I spoke. Not many people knew that, in India, most of us are taught English almost right from the time we get out of the crib. So they thought that it was wonderful that I could speak so fluently so soon after landing in the US ;-)!

Now, at work, again we have people from a whole bunch of countries. I am able to get comfortably by with my English and I no longer have to keep reminding myself to slow down.

Of course, even now, sometimes, I do encounter people who have difficulty understanding what I say. Oh well, sometimes, I can't understand what the other person is trying to tell either. I guess it all evens out! But at least, no one has since asked me "do you speak English?" after hearing me talk!!

p.s. My experiences trying to understand others in the USA would make a whole post by itself :-)!

Left or Right?

When I first came to the US in 2001, I adjusted surprisingly fast to living in an "alien" land. This could be attributed to the fact that Davis is the very definition of a university town - a population majorly consisting of students from various corners of the world, a safe environment, a small but self-contained city. It also helped a lot that Davis is located in the liberal state of California - the demographic diversity made sure that I never felt like a "foreigner" from day one.

However, one thing which took a lot of getting used to was driving on the right side of the road as opposed to the left side of the road as is practised in India. Normally this shouldn't have mattered a lot - I was just a student then and driving a car was a distant dream. And no one cares really where you walk.

However Davis, besides being an university town, was a city of bicycles - meaning that almost everyone relied upon bicycles as the primary means of transport. I had to get a bike too if I did not want to wear out my feet due to constant walking. So I bought a bike. In spite of not having rode a bike for some time, I did manage to get around okay. Other than one problem. When I rode a bike, for some reason, I always rode it on the sidewalk. On the left side of the road. I think it created some illusion of being in India! Anyways, I kept this up for almost 2 weeks after which an old guy standing on the sidewalk treated me to such a delightful collection of choice expletives that I got shocked into riding on the road again. So I was forced to constantly remind myself to keep to the right side of the road.

One day, about a month after my arrival in Davis, I was riding to the my department from my apartment. The route was fairly straightforward. To turn into the lane leading to my department, I had to go around a small triangular island and turn left. I usually used to do this correctly. However, that particular day, I was feeling lazy and decided to take a "short-cut". Instead of going around the divider, I just biked over to the left side of the road and continued on the left side for the short distance before I had to turn left. Suddenly I heard a ear-piercing whistle behind me and turned around to see a bike-cop (yes, Davis had cops specially for monitoring bicycle users). Gulp! The cop asked me if I was an international student. I dumbly nodded. Then he asked me if I knew that I was on the wrong side of the road. I tried to look as innocent as possible and said that I thought I was on the wrong side and would he please forgive me.

The cop then continued to state that I could be fined $93 (aaaarghhh) for the violation that I had just committed and he was letting me go since I was a new international student but I better watch out or he would definitely fine me the next time. Then he let me go. I promptly got on my bike and continued to pedal on the left side of the road. The bike cop blew his whistle again and I told him smartly that since it was just a matter of a couple of feet, I would just continue on the left side. I think this was when the bike cop would have really loved to give me the biggest ticket possible. Instead he managed to only grit his teeth and tell me that I had to go around the island if I did not want a ticket! This time I did go on the right side!

Now I realize that it wasn't very smart of me to ride on the left side in the first place. And even less smart to be cheeky to a cop! In any case, I found out from the seniors later that if a bike cop accosted you at the beginning of any quarter, you could always feign ignorance due to being a new "international" student and get away with it most of the time! Sometimes being a "foreigner" helps ;-)!

From the days of mistaking left and right, nowadays I have the exact reverse problem. Whenever I go to India, for the first few days, anticipating an accident, I always close my eyes when people drive me on the left side!