(For continuity, read part 1 if you haven't already)
CHAPTER 2- Culinary experiences, an English lesson and the One Cent incident
We had been eating a lot of ready-to-eat stuff till then. Once MS came, he brought with him his culinary skills. Actually all of us had recipes with us and knew some basic cooking. We were just too lazy to experiment and MS brought that enthu with him and enthusiasm is always pretty infectious. We all did our part in cooking, but to sum up I was the vegetable cutter and dishwasher. JD was the main dishwasher and cleaner. JB was the vegetable cutter and cook. MS was the head cook. AZ, after he came back from Seattle, also helped with the dishes, cleaning and cutting. Rice, sambhar, and a poriyal was a pretty standard menu for us.
We often had easy-to-make food like pre-made pizzas, where all we had to is just put the pizza in the oven and in ten minutes, it would be cooked. But easy-to-make often turned out into some exercise for us, thanks to the wonderfully hypersensitive smoke detector in our apartment, which did more harm than good. Each time a crumb of pizza rested on anything other than the grill, there would be some smoke emitted from it and our wonderful smoke detector would sense it and start wailing like a banshee as if it were a forest fire. And we would have to take any object we could get hold of and try to shoo the smoke away from the smoke detector. By the time it was done, we would be too tired to eat the now-stale pizza.
Another time, I saw something in packets on the shelves of the Safeway supermarket that resembled rotis. It was called "tortillas". Thinking it was just another fancy name Westerners had made for our rotis (I once saw a place which served the fancy sounding “rice puffed cakes”, which turned out to be our…idlis), I bought a packet of that. Little did I know that they would smell so much worse than a skunk on opening the packet after getting home that we would have to chuck the whole thing and go hungry that night. After that experience, I never took my chances with Mexican food.
We explored Davis quite a bit (finding our way using maps), walking as far as a few miles some days and the effort was worth it just to see MS's expression on his face realizing he had to walk so much. ;).
We also spent some time participating in live politics of #219 :D. Was pretty interesting to be a negotiator. LOL. Then as a consequence, we spent some time honing our carpentry skills :P (Sensitive issue ppl...can't elaborate further :D)...
Then AZ came back in a few days and at last it was all the 5 of us homies together. The BLUE FLAMEZ united at last.
Once all of us went out and ate at a place called "Baker's square", where they had about 50 pies to choose from and they were the tastiest any of us have ever had and ever will have. That was an oft visited haunt for us from then on.
JD, MS and I decided to get ourselves bikes (i am referring to bicycles here- not one of those cool mo’bikes) and so we went to Walmart in the next town, Woodland by bus to get that. We got good solid bikes for 60 odd dollars and much to MS's disdain, we decided to ride the bike home a whole 10+ miles and that too without knowing the way properly. We embarrassed ourselves umpteen times doing things like trying to cross the interstate highway at a place where there weren’t even traffic lights. That was one of the few times when one of the cars honked at MS, when he tried to dart across when the car was approaching at 70 mph on the highway. According to JD's juxaggerated*(refer footnotes for definition) version, MS ran to the middle of the road with his cycle and the car screeched to a halt from 100 mph and the driver honked for a whole ten minutes. Not one; not two. But TEN minutes. :D. This is the version the SRM girls who asked us about it heard, much to our amusement and MS's chagrin. :P. So anyway, we got the bike and ourselves safely back home. And we locked it with the tube locks we had got from India, as we heard locks were expensive in the US. Only later we realized how our intention to save 10 $ backfired to make us (me) lose 60 $.
We woke up the next morning (err...afternoon actually...) and went out to find just my bike missing. On further inspection, we found that the tube lock I had locked it with had been broken open and the digits of the combination lock were lying separately. The most exasperating thing about it was that there was also a one cent coing lying near the broken lock. Now whether it was dropped by mistake or on purpose by the thief as a token of his theft, as a tip to me, after stealing something worth 6000 odd times its value, I do not know but it was like adding insult to injury. Hence we called it the "One cent incident” after that. It was evident that the thief had also tried to cut open JD's and MS's locks with a sharp tool, from the cut marks all over that we noticed but he had abandoned it midway due to some reason and left.
With the One Cent and the broken lock in my hand.
JD and MS were paranoid about bike theft after that and immediately went back to walmart and returned theirs. It’s an amazing concept that walmart lets people buy stuff and takes the product back within 60 days with a full refund, without any questions asked. The fact that this works in the American system, is something to be admired about its people. No one takes advantage and buys stuff, uses them and returns it within a couple of months once they’re done with it. I am sure a large percentage of Indians would do that if given an opportunity. As a live example, there were a couple of professors who came from SRM to UC Davis to study the system there for a month or so and they got a camera at walmart, used it to click pictures while they were there and finally returned it back to get a full refund. The people cannot be blamed as there is so much competition among ourselves and survival of the fittest is the universal principle, so we make best use of every opportunity where we are benefited selfishly. I quite possibly would do the same, when hard pressed. Anyways... I deviated. Back to our story... so MS and JD returned their bikes and got the refund.
I however lost my 60 $, though JD made a great gesture of making me insist on taking one third of his refund back, as he argued we got the cycles together and any of ours could have been stolen. Appreciate that, mate!!!
Our other apartment-mates had arrived by then. One was Hyun-Jyun, a really cool guy from South Korea. He spoke really good English and was as American as anyone cos he had his family living in the States. He was easy to get along with, minded his own business, and overall a great apartment mate. Then came along a chap from Japaaaan (that’s how he pronounces it). We could see he was pretty immature and probably had not much experience living with other people in an alien country. Communicating with him wasn’t that easy as his English wasn’t really sound, but he seemed a nice innocent chap initially. We helped him settle down, taking him shopping, having him eat with us for the first couple of days (though he couldn’t tolerate our food as he found it too spicy. Then he started eating his normal food- plain cooked vegetables and stuff. A caveman’s diet if you ask me). Only later, we realized how difficult it would be to get along with him, because of his hypersensitivity to noise. Even if we talked in our rooms, with the doors closed, he would knock on our doors (and later even barge into our room), to ask us to "reduce the volume", which was pretty irritating. Even if one of us switched on the light in the living room, he would come out of his room and ask us to switch it off as he apparently would not be able to sleep with the light seeping through the crack in his closed room door. And so unsurprisingly there were many unpleasant encounters between him and a few of us, resulting in him moving to a new apartment the next quarter.
FOOTNOTES:
*- juxaggeration- noun- exaggerating something to a superlative extent. Word stems from the root jagadish and the suffix exaggeration because of Jagadish’s tendencies to exaggerate something so much out of proportion that one realizes it isn’t true. Word is being processed by Oxford press for incorporation into their dictionary.
Example: How I just defined the word is what is juxaggeration :P
(TO BE CONTINUED...NEXT POST FRIDAY, 14th AUG)
