let the adventures begin

well tis was when i moved into my new rented apartment. it happens to be bigger than my house.

right on the first day we had goof-ups if you may call them. we all had a good laugh at the moments and what's in store for us.

now everywhere in america you have the smoke alarms installed in the house, in every room! and this is quite new to us( me and my room mates) as we never had such a feature in our homes. there is a smoke detector in our kitchen. there is also an exhaust fan available for us to use when we cook. but since it is new to us, we didnt bother to switch on the exhaust fan. and in moments we realised the presence of the smoke alarm. it went out *beep*,*beep*,*beep*.

our memories of a smoke detector going off was only in the movies where the scene was of a burning building. but in this case, the big question was, where is the fire? panic stricken we looked for means to turn it off.

one thing that we also noticed in l.a. was that the fire department is proactive. our house has a window that looked onto the road where we could listen and see the fire truck wailing its siren away almost every 2 hours or so. now we were wondering if they would be heading for us? so we opened up the windows, furled up the blinds and still the alarm wouldn't go off.
this was very similar to a protagonist trying to rescue a baby from a burning building, the only difference was we didnt know what to do. there was this button on the smoke alarm. and some how we figured that upon depressing the button again, the alarm would calm. :P

then i yanked out the stick that supported the hangers from the closet and tried it at the alarm. then another roommate of mine draws a chair underneath the alarm and depresses the alarm button and it goes back to its mute state.

if you think that was all for a day, it isn't.

now the concept of heaters is also new to us naive youngsters. ours works on the concept of gas. the land lady had told us to put the heater in a "pilot" mode when not in use. i asked for its significance she didnt have a reply. in the "pilot" mode however it was still on, on a lower flame though.

things started heating up in sometime though it was on a pilot mode and we couldnt take it anymore. so thats when we shut the gas supply off thereby turning the heater off completely. that worked out all fine and dandy.

that night though we felt the need of the heater, which is when we turned it on and we ready to enjoy the warmth it gave. but it didnt give out anything. and then we looked around and thats when we realised that there wasnt any flame to burn the gas which is when we realised the significance of the pilot mode.

anyway, we needed to strike a flame in that encasement. we neither had a long match stick or any such means light the flame. we took a newspaper. wound it tight so as to form a stick and lit it with a match stick. this is pretty much how the primitive man who invented fire would have done after some point of time minus the newspaper. now we started poking at the gas outlet in the encasement. nothing! again and nothing! then again and zilch! this was demoralizing and puzzling for us because we were engineers by profession and would not accept anything without a proper reasoning.what arrogance!

then we let the gas flow freely and lit. and i was the one hold that torch and *bhoop * came the noise and the flame came right at me and there is was, burning in all its splendor.

oh i forgot to mention that in case something went wrong i had one of my room mates with a cooker filled with water.

then again we had a good laugh.

playing with fire right on the day of signing the lease for the apartment! some fun eh?

i guess i have rambled on for quite some time now. i shall give you some breathing space.

till we meet again

k for kyos

here are the pics!

bon jour la

well here i am . in l.a. phew! i must say i was excited.

once you are here is when you realise the hardships,the hurdles that lay ahead of you. the very idea of building everything from scratch with nothing is seemingly very detterent for any faint heart.

everyone faces them,anyone who has come here leaving the rosy family thousands of miles behind him. and everyone has a fresh new identity to start out with. i really dont know how to put it in words but i shall try my best.

i was taken in by a senior of mine who i must say was really helpful in all sorts. i was taken aback by the amount of help that he had extended to me. i shall never forget that. all for a one person whom he had met only 2-3 times. then i was taken where a group of students welcomed me and prepared food. we had a jolly of a time. all for a one person whom they had never met in their life! but then in today's world who would be so nice?

the only tool that you have to start out with ,in this brave new world, is trust. hehe, if you dont have that, consider yourself to be a gonner. i sensed this in the past few days. amongst new people all you can offer is trust and that's a BIG thing and do whatever you can so that they dont loose it on you.

i guess i am done saying. pretty much an arbitrary ending.

till we meet again

good bye