Guest Blogger: View from the Other Side

My colleague and friend Ramadas is spending a few weeks in Rochester, his first visit to the U.S. I invited him to do a "guest blogger" entry to share his impressions, and he submitted the following.

Ram (wedding day photo)

In this..the last few hours at Rochester, I start to write about the last three weeks of my life at Rochester, NY, USA. From a person who has seen it first hand, let me tell you that the US is nothing like what we see in the movies or TV serials. There are so many things big and small that I observed that it becomes difficult to share all of them…so let me try to start from the beginning. The USA is a land of rules….and most importantly…peopled by those who follow them!! When I got out of the airport building and was trolleying my luggage to a car, I had to cross a road (within the airport) to reach the car. I was just about to cross the road when a car came by. On instinct I stopped to allow the car go past but to my greatest surprise and confusion, the car stopped as well and another car came by and stopped too!!! It was only after I had actually crossed the road that the cars started moving!!!! Well, the pedestrian is treated as the “king” here…amazing. And the taxes they pay actually get used…you should see the roads to believe that! People also pay a school tax and send their wards to a public school (school run by the state government) They don’t pay tuition fees but only a tax.

Rochester is a park, a forest with people living in beautiful houses with lawns. The whole place looks like some landscaping artist went berserk. Seems like the forest was already there before people moved in. Point to note is that they MAINTAIN the woods, lawns and the trees. And the whole place is one unending meadow because there are no compound walls or picket fences between houses!!! No compound walls! It is considered impolite to have compound walls. And there are rules and laws to ensure that you maintain your lawn.

My first impressions of the place were the exact opposite of a visitor from Rochester coming to Chennai for the first time. Rochester looks like a place that’s cleaned, scrubbed, dried, shined every single day!! Everything looks so neat and organized that you think there are people who come behind you and arrange everything into the correct place! Population is very low comparitively..so peak hour traffic looks like the traffic we have on “bandh”or any other public holiday!!

At work, people lead a very “scheduled” life. You need to check with the electronic calendar or schedule of people you need to meet before getting to talk to them. All events or meetings happen with a schedule, agenda, minutes and gives a feeling of clockwork. They do not have “lunch hours” or time for “tea breaks”. They have lunch or coffee at their cubicles even as they continue their work. They work exactly for 8 hours and usually between 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Some people work between 7:00 a.m and 4:00 p.m and have the entire evening for themselves. The first Friday I was here, Paul Krause took us for a “hike” to the Powder Mills Park after work. It is a park just in name and a forest really! I could scarce believe that I was hiking in the woods on a Friday around 5:30 in the evening!!!!

Greeting and smiling at strangers seems to be part of the culture here. If you are standing in the way in the corridor, they greet and smile before moving on. If you are checking something on a counter in a grocery store, people wait behind you till you are done. I simply found it difficult to react for the first few days before getting myself to greet back!

The Grocery stores!! Well, the one at Wegmanns obviously was the biggest and most amazing. The number of choices and the variety available for each item is tremendous. I can count at least 10 to 15 brands of the same item in some cases. There seems to be nothing called medium or small here. Everything is of large, extra large, or super large size! The vegetables here were one of the biggest I have seen…Wading through all those choices and actually getting ourselves (I traveled luckily with another colleague of mine - Arvind) to make a choice was an effort in itself. Best example of such difficult choices was to give an order for coffee at Starbucks…coffee plain and simple..but decaffeinated? With or without cream? And many more questions for which I had no answer! J

The Greater Rochester area is blessed with lot of natural resources especially water! There are so many types of lakes around – finger lakes, ocean lakes, great lakes! Lake Ontario is what I call an ocean lake…a lake that looks like an ocean! It actually has tides, waves, beaches…and a beautiful ferry that goes all the way to Toronto, Canada..amazing.

But the most amazing of all water bodies I saw was the Niagara Falls…looked beautiful. The force of the falls is best observed when we were taken close to the fall point on the “Maid of the Mist” boat cruise. And the number of Indian tourists there was surprising to say the least. After traveling 10, 000 miles for 22 hours on air, you find it weird to go to Niagara falls and listen to somebody calling out in Tamil to their child not to go too close to the edge of the observation deck!! A lawn around the falls has stalls and also people relaxing and having a picnic. At one point, I saw a stall of Native American Indians on the right and Indian tourists(Indian Indian!!) on the left of a lawn picnicking with their families. I really wonder what Columbus would have thought if he had seen both sets of “Indians” at Niagara at the same time. I felt really strange…this land is truly a melting pot of people. I have heard of it. I see it now. J

tags: rochester  india