Finally i have arrived in the United States of America after a long long Flight. There was a huge Queue at the immigration as 70 percent of the Immigration counters were not working at 4 in the afternoon. It took me 2 hours to complete the immigration and customs procedures. My flight to buffalo was at 9:40pm and hence i had to spend 3 hours at the O’Hare International airport and then board a flight to Buffalo,NY. After 3 hours i boarded the flight to Buffalo, which was a small chartered flight with a capacity of around 30 people. I reached Buffalo around midnight and boarded a taxi to my seniors home.
I woke up pretty late the next day at around 9:00 as i was just recovering from the Jet Lag. My senior took me to the college to get my ID card and have a first look of the campus where i will be spending my next 2 years. The campus is a huge one and i have to take a campus shuttle bus which will take around 15 min to cover 10Kms. The campus has 6 full fledged food courts, lots of open landscapes, greenery and its own lake.It seems like half of Buffalo is UB’s. I dont think the Americans know how to build small things. Right from coffee to buildings everything in this country is enormous. The Roads inside the college are like the highways in India unlike NIT Trichy where the roads are full of potholes. My department is situated in a 11 storey building and it is shared by Chemical and Mechanical Engineering departments. The public in general are very helpful and kind. The professors here dont like to be addressed as Sir/Madam and instead want them to be addressed by their names( Very Strange for a student from India, where a hue and cry will be raised when a student addresses the professor by his name). I got a mobile phone connection in ten minutes and opened a bank account in 10 Minutes(Which is very fast).
Three days after landing in buffalo, me and my friends moved into a rented apartment(rent 250$ per head). Its a 4 Bedroom apartment, with a big Living rooms, fully furnished with Washing Machines, Dryers, Microwave Owens, Heaters, Couch etc. We went to Buffalo city to get the gas and electricity connections. That was the first time i got a feel of USA. We took a Metro rail from the university to the City centre where the gas office is situated. The metro in buffalo is an Old one with the underground sections serving high speed connectivity and then converting into a tram inside the City. Public transport is costly here as the minimum ticket costs you around Rs.175. Our next priority was to get a Internet connection. The internet speed offered here is something that is out of the world for a person like me as i get only 1Mbps at home and here i am being offered a net connection with a speed of 15Mbps and that too for 5$. I think the internet connection is the only thing in the US that is Cheaper than India. When i asked the officer whether the internet usage is Unlimited, the officer gave me a strange look. Everything is in place in the house after a week of hard work and now we can relax a bit until the college starts.
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