People are strange when you're a stranger...

Some surprises at Chicago…

1. People are nice
A lot of people I met on the road were quite sweet-patiently explaining directions again and again, pointing out places and stopping at zebra crossings. On my 2nd day here, I asked directions from an old lady who was walking her dog. After pointing out the place, she said quote “You look like a decent young man” Unquote and invited me home for a cup of coffee. We chatted for almost an hour and half ; nice conversation spanning family, travel, art and relationships. She also gave me quite a few of her contacts and asked me to drop in once in a while if I wasn’t too busy…apparently I would enjoy meeting her husband who was a professor. Max, her dog, was kind of neutral initially, but totally surrendered to my secret dog weapon - a combo ear-throat and tummy rub, and rolled over! This experience apart, people at the campus are generally helpful while people in Chicago town are a lot more brusque…like say the diff between Mumbai and say, Sholapur in India. Unlike in India, there are a whole lot of oohs and aahs when people greet each other…on the road, you are often asked “Hey.howja doing?”; initially I was quite perplexed about how to handle this…stop and reply? Ignore and walk? Just nod? These days, I manage to nod and say “fine, nice day, ma friend”. But what my newly-American mind wants my Indian tongue cant deliver (yet!) and so I end up mumbling something which makes people even more confused…it would have been funny if it wasn’t me ;-(

2. Some aren’t
There seem to be very clear boundaries of safe and unsafe areas- between XX and YY roads, its safe- a few metres away it’s not …for eg, eager to check out a “Lagoon”, I crossed over from a safe street to an unsafe street…immediately a guy started following me at a distance of about 20 mtrs…I cross, he crosses, I stop, he stops…got a bit scared but he was smaller than me, so decided to make a run for the safer side again and this jerk followed me almost all the way into the next street too before he kind of slowed down. After 7pm, the “regulars” on the street are just a bit risky to deal with whereas the “travellers”-the executive returning home, the man walking a dog, the lady with her groceries seem more likely to be helpful.

3. Meeting up with Venus-after Alex, this is the 2nd blogger that I have actually met with. Venus lives just a bit away from Chicago and she pointed me in the general direction of Walmart and Kohls and by the time she caught up, I owed them almost a hundred dollars. She’s getting married soon and I am sure our hero knows he’s a lucky dude ;-) We had dinner at an Indian restaurant with a couple of her friends and laughed over jokes that only us, Indians could enjoy…after a week of strange accents and cheeses, it was nice to chat in Hindi/English over Rotis and Alu Gobi.