Nine Weeks with Uncle Sam

In January, the wife and i were on a 2-month visit to Daughter I who lives with her family in the US of A. We had a wonderful time with the grand daughter and grand son.

In Time Zone, USA is ten and a half hours behind India. So it is almost on the other side of the world, or to be more correct, the other side of the Earth.

After reaching USA, i read two novels by Chetan Bhagat, who gave up his investment banking in Hong Kong to live in Mumbai to become a full-time writer. In his novel 'Half A Girlfriend' the protagonist is struck by two things on his first visit to USA, the clear blue sky and the silence on the roads. He ascribes the first one to the absence of dust in the air as it is in India. The second is due to the fact that vehicle-drivers do not honk in contrast to the cacophony on the roads in India. I have been equally struck by these features. A friend had once jocularly observed that drivers in India blow their horns more to prevent being hit by the other vehicles than for any other purpose!

It was a chilly January, with icy cold winds. One morning,the wife hung a small piece of wet cloth outside to dry. A little after, I found that the cloth had become stiff; the little water in the cloth had frozen and had made the cloth stiff. I noticed that the little streams of water which had oozed out of at the lower ends of the wet cloth had also frozen and looked like frills. After some time, the sun appeared; the cloth got dried up and became soft again.

Once we visited the headquarters of CNN (Cable Network News) and went around its studio, newsroom and other work-places. It is very impressive.

We also visited the Head Quarters of Coca Cola where we viewed a 4-D documentary on Coca Cola. Then we visited a room there in which the various brands of this soft drink all over the world are available on tap. These are grouped continent-wise, like, Asia, Europe, America,Africa etc. I found that the Indian soft drink Thums Up was also there. Coca Cola acquired the company in 1993. We found that the brands on sale in Germany are slightly bitter.

I visited a nearby library, and during the first visit, borrowed two novels by Chetan Bhagat and Charles Dickens's David Copperfield, which the author has declared as his most favourite writing.

Here are some photos at C N N and at Coca Cola Head Quarters: