A Change is Gonna Come...

It is Sunday evening as I am typing this, just over 1.5 days since I landed at JFK on Sat morning at about 4.15am. I'm still feeling kinda awful, probably from the heavy jet lag, with slight dizzy spells every so often.

Just some quick notes then, based on the 40+ hours I've spent here thus far, as that's about all my brain can muster.

*I spend about 12 hours in the Detroit airport. My flight landed there at about 2.15pm on Fri, and my connecting flight was scheduled at 9.11pm. How horrible, a 7 hour wait, you think. If only. The flight was delayed, delayed and delayed more before it finally took off at about 2.40am. It didn't help that I didn't get much sleep on the plane rides (of about 20 hours in total) before and couldn't do so at the airport for fear of getting baggage stolen. So, yeah, that sucked and was not a good start.

*The ironic thing about that flight delay was that towards the end of the wait, I was sorta hoping it might as well go beyond 6 hours because then I could actually claim insurance. Of course, it had to be so near yet so far.

*Met and spoke to 2 people on my plane journey. The first was a fellow int'l student from China who also studied in New York. We shared a plane ride from Narita to Detroit. From her, I learnt that there're so many Chinese students in most of the universities that it's like they never left home.
The second I met while on that interminable wait in Detroit. She was a Filipino-American who lives in NYC and worked at Dunkin' Donuts. She offered me her cell to call my mum, so that was cool.

*My very first meal on American soil (in the Detroit airport) was . . . a McDonald's Fillet O' Fish set meal. As I've mentioned before, it's the reason why obesity here is so closely linked to poverty. McD's is the cheapest thing here.

*You're right, Ad. I realised as I was unpacking that I had way, way overpacked. For the curious: My two checked-in baggages weighed 26.7 and 32.4 kgs respectively and for my carry-on stuff, I had a big blue Adidas bag which weighed probably about 10-11kgs and a separate laptop bag, and a tennis racket. Adamant of not spending money for stupid reasons, I refused to pay the USD3 bucks needed to get a trolley at JFK. Thankfully, I found a free one after lugging all my barang barang for about 50m. That was not fun.

*I have a bad, bad case of culture shock. Most of the other international students here are the ones who've lived in 5,0000 countries in their lives, or they went to American int'l schools, so they are basically Americans. The locals here are as I expected: Very individualistic, very loud, quirky, eccentric (at times, a euphemistic term) (One theatre guy is a professional fight choreographer. Said dude is to be called by Yoishi, instead of his official name, Robert, which he says he will not respond to.) (Note: This is more characteristics of students here, not generalisations of all Americans). It's tough to relate to their conversations. My roommate's kinda not like that though, which is nice.

*I've to qualify almost EVERY single introduction of my name with a "you know, like the silver or the pound." It's because I don't pronounce it the American way with the heavy emphasis on the R sound.

*Michael Fay is old news. The apparent thing most locals ask when I mention Singapore is if we jail people for littering.

*Army stories impress too! It's too bad my NSF posting was rather un-Army-like. Haha.

*True to media depictions, everything is "awesome".

*I've already had pseudo-intellectual discussions on religion, abortion, gender/race identity, etc. Harry Potter is a great cultural unifier too.

*Speaking of identity, I find that mine has been reduced to "Asian foreign student". For now anyway, hopefully.

*I live in an old, postcard-ish 2-storey bungalow converted to house 13 people. It's very pretty but very creaky. Will post pictures in time. The weather right now is bloody brilliant (some Brit-speak to keep me from getting all American-speak-ised). Hot sun with very cool winds. Picture-perfect late summer weather. Still a tad dry for my liking though.

*The school (and apparently, most US unis) blocks P2P software like uTorrent and Emule. And it is really, really, really NOT awesome. I am very upset and frustrated over it. It's THE most disorientating thing right now. Seriously.

*Mostly, seeing the youthful enthusiasm of fellow freshmen, I am feeling very, very old and weary, and four years now seem like a very, very long time.

*rueful smile*

Zaid and I at Changi Airport. How, erm, awesome that he was working a graveyard shift that day. Thanks Lina for reminding me to contact him!