I reached the United States almost a month before today. I think I can finally say I have settled down in Davis. Davis is fairly small college town around two hours from the bay area. Seems to be a little to isolated, but kind of nice in its own way. Since I am now a graduate student, I know that I am going to be living here for the next few years. This, I guess is an attempt to document my first perceptions of this new place and to record my first few days here.
I have the good fortune of finding people who are always ready to help — I was picked up from the airport, accompanied to Davis, provided with food and accommodation. These people who helped me are obviously the first friends I knew in this alien place. They were kind enough to walk me through the ways of graduate student life and made me prepared for what was ahead. I still wonder what I would have done without the help of these individuals. Then, I got my apartment (not to mention the whole list of things that had to be done to set it up for living), a phone and an internet connection. Finally, things started falling in place. We (myself and my apartment mate) now cook on an almost regular basis, which I find is way better than hunting for food outside. As most people tell you, only the first few days are hard.
By this time, we were already a week in to our classes. The first thought that crossed my mind is that these are no different from the “good” classes I have had in the past four years — So, the only difference was that, now all courses were “good” 
. These courses have been keeping me quite busy, with an assignment that has to be turned in almost every week. The department as a whole seems warm and friendly — we even had a student-faculty volley ball match. And, yes, my fellow graduate students seem to be lively bunch. A rather surprising fact I discovered about myself is that I like teaching! I do find myself looking forward to days I teach. Another thing that I am happy about is that there are only three courses that one has to worry about and this means you can spend time thinking about nuances unlike the rush of getting things done in undergraduate courses. While those are the good things about the place, there are certain things I despise: Some professors choose to teach a textbook instead of the course material — for someone like me who has always managed courses with class notes, it is kind of different and gets painful when the books are expensive. I was also told that the “UC Davis library does not compete with the bookstore and hence does not acquire textbooks”! — looks like nice scheme to make profits.
Finally for those random things that I want to mention. For someone from a city like Chennai, it feels so wrong when a car stops and asks you to go ahead and cross the road — at least the first few days I was like, “Are these guys trying to get me to the middle of the road so that they can run over me?”. (For those of you who are not familiar with the traffic rules here: The pedestrian has right of way i.e. if you are trying to cross a road cars better stop and give way.) I hear people telling me that California is a hub of vegan and vegetarians but I am yet to find another person (non-indian) who happens to be a vegan. Most people in Davis own a bicycle and this is a good place to see all kinds of bicycles. The place also has a small cinema theater which I visited to catch ‘Social Network’. On the whole, I think the place is good and offers a good environment to do research, the purpose of me coming here!
