It was January of 2005. I was 'one week old' in the United States. I wasn't prepared for this. Once I was all settled in my new "room" in a beautiful sunny Victorian in the Panhandle district, I was out and about meeting people and having conversations... I was always asked the inevitable : "When did you learn to speak English, you just got here"? "So do you have elephants walking down your streets?" and many more questions.
Now, coming from a pretty stringent school system in India where penmanship is as important as your math skills, and where you were required to stand in front of a class of 50 kids and recite "I wandered lonely as a cloud..." by Wordsworth, I wasn't prepared with an answer on why I could speak English.
Coming from a background and culture where being as polite as possible is inherent in our upbringing I still don't know how to tell people with a straight face that we don't have elephants walking down the streets...but we do have over a billion people and traffic congestion-elephants are the last thing we need on our streets! The question about elephants was only second best to "oh so can you walk to Srilanka?"
So many more crisp, cool mornings with the smell of freshly lit weed in the air ( I said I lived by the Panhandle, in case you missed it :-) These were some of my first and very interesting experiences that have over the years unfolded into beautiful and pleasant memories of lovely San Francisco.
I will try to keep my posts short and sweet- I'm sure the Twitter generation will appreciate it :-) Other fellow immigrants, do share with me some of your earliest recollections.
Thanks for reading!
Lotika
Now, coming from a pretty stringent school system in India where penmanship is as important as your math skills, and where you were required to stand in front of a class of 50 kids and recite "I wandered lonely as a cloud..." by Wordsworth, I wasn't prepared with an answer on why I could speak English.
Coming from a background and culture where being as polite as possible is inherent in our upbringing I still don't know how to tell people with a straight face that we don't have elephants walking down the streets...but we do have over a billion people and traffic congestion-elephants are the last thing we need on our streets! The question about elephants was only second best to "oh so can you walk to Srilanka?"
So many more crisp, cool mornings with the smell of freshly lit weed in the air ( I said I lived by the Panhandle, in case you missed it :-) These were some of my first and very interesting experiences that have over the years unfolded into beautiful and pleasant memories of lovely San Francisco.
I will try to keep my posts short and sweet- I'm sure the Twitter generation will appreciate it :-) Other fellow immigrants, do share with me some of your earliest recollections.
Thanks for reading!
Lotika
No comments:
Post a Comment