"PLEASE DO not leave anything out in the backyard for the third week of next month," said my husband. I thought finally he was planning on painting it! "No yellow please," I declared. No sooner than I said it, I realised that he was browsing through the Internet to find out the weather forecast of the next month.

"Welcome to Umreeca my dear."

Coming from a metropolitan city of India and a uniformly global world, I felt it should not be that challenging to fit in the American lifestyle. But I had to change my opinion when I asked the seven star hotel’s manager at Hawaii, why haven’t they provided jets on the toilet seat?

I thought getting used to using tissue paper rolls was easy to accommodate compared to losing the ambiguity of tomorrow to the very present. Imagine having your umbrella ready since you already know it’s going to rain. I like to get wet in the rain, especially if it gives me a reason to bunk lectures and classes without feeling guilty, but not any more I guess.

Don’t get me wrong. I love being in this country. It has a lot to offer that too in big sizes, and I mean it literally. You go to a super market to get some groceries and you are so mesmerised by the outlook of that big and shining capsicum, oops, I mean bell-pepper (that’s how the Americans like to call it) and you think wow, this is going to be an awesome meal. But as it turns out, sizes never determine the flavour, and you outrightly conclude, the Indian thelai-wala has much better and cheaper fruits and vegetables. Not only the vegetables and fruits are big but here queues are equally big.

Nowhere in India do you see lines extending till five miles. (Okay, India might have a stampede instead of an organised queue but if you know of someone there you might at least get the tickets without standing in line), but in this country, I stood for 75 minutes in a queue for each ride (almost 10 rides) at Disney Land in Los Angeles and I was mad at my husband for not having the right kind of ‘pulls’, not that his knowing of someone would have helped, I wanted to take out my frustration on him since he is an American and a part of the system. You got to pull through queues and lines, this is Umreeca my dear!