First experience with snow!!!

I have seen snow only in photos and videos but not in reality before. I know there is not much snow in California and I was worried that I was going to miss the experience. But there is a place called Tahoe with so many mountains and it had very good amount of snow. It was a two hour drive from my sister in law's house. I was very excited at the first site of snow on the road as we were nearing Tahoe. It was a sunny day and I was scared that I will not get an opportunity to touch it or play with it by the time we reach the place. So, we pulled over on the road to have a feel of it. As soon as the car stopped, I was the first to jump out of it and run towards it to touch it.

Snow is nothing but finely crushed ice. I held it in my hand for as long as I could and had some photos taken.We then continued our journey. As we were approaching the place, the view began to get better and better. The mountains had snow over them here and there in the beginning. But later, the mountains were covered with a thick blanket of snow which looked like untouched thick layer of vanilla ice-cream. I with held my temptation to take and eat a scoop of it!

After we reached Tahoe and got down from the car, it was freezing cold. It was around 11:30AM when we boarded a gandora(rope way) to go high above into the thick layers of snow. I was not tired of wondering how beautiful the view was after every minute. It was just awesome. We landed at a view point midway where we had a chance to go around in a circle to enjoy the view and come back. We could see the tall casino buildings in the Nevada state, snow covered mountains, lot of greenery, and the three shades of the huge lake Tahoe. We got onto the gandora again and reached the final stop.

wowwww is what I said the moment we saw snow snow and snow all around. Infact there were people skiing in the snow there. It felt really good to watch them. I looked and looked and looked.. till I was satisfied and then started playing and rolling over it. The snow seemed to be pure white in color and quite soft. I even made an Olaf(a fictional snowman character from animated film, Frozen) with it, taking breaks in between to calm my numb hands. We threw snow at each other and ran and fell and had loads and loads of fun! The ride back in the gandora was equally good.

On the way back I realized that snow is good to play and have fun now an then. But it is very troublesome to live in places where it snows. Driving in snow is risky and involves great care and concentration.

First few days in US

As a child, I was really crazy about US, main reason being the fact that it was held very high upon by many people around. I have a couple of school and college friends carrying a jansport backpack saying it was from US. And I used to hear a lot of stories about how the life style in America is from a lot of people who have their relatives there, some real and some very highly blown up. America is very neat, roads are very clean, rules are strictly followed, there is a very good work culture there, we can earn a lot of money there - waitress gets a tip of about 2-3 dollars which is like 100-150 Indian rupees. In short, people gave a picture that living in America is a luxury and to most people foreign country means America and only America.. I used to think - hmmm.. Whats with this America in reality? Have to pay a visit sometime! 

As time passed, I forgot about this. Its almost been a week since I landed in California with my family and here are a few things that I noticed about this place. Firstly, the place is vvvvvaaast. It felt that the sky was closer to us than it was in India and also, I could see that the earth is Spherical as in the sky felt like it was merging with the earth in all the direction far beyond. Upon discussing this with Vijay, we suspect that in India, we don't have much of an open space to look so much beyond and that could be a reason for my observation here. Secondly,  there are hardly any bikes on the roads. Sreesikha, my elder daughter noticed this. I was really curious to see many cars with cycles in stands over or behind the cars. Some cars even had small boats behind them in a stand. Its tough to manage around without a car in hand as the city is very huge and there is no public transport to every place. Most of the things here are huuuuuge. The shops are very huge with high roofs. The Onions, water melons, Oranges, Lemons, Potatoes were all of the biggest sizes I have seen so far. I have also seen very small tomatoes and baby carrots. I am just too excited about all the varieties and sizes of vegetables and fruits to worry about the hybridization and where it leads us to.

Most of the places are stroller friendly, which was really good for us. I fell in love with some of the dishes here that we don't generally get in authentic form over there. For Instance, I liked the Bagels, Croissants, big juicy muffins, pan cakes, waffles, huge variety of breakfast cereal, breakfast bars and a lot more. Having visited other countries earlier, I thought its a tough task to survive as a vegetarian away from India. But I was totally wrong. There are umpteen varieties that you could live on. The best part I liked so far is shopping with coupons where you get a lot of discounts! ;) lol

I have a few more weeks to explore the place.. will post by whenever I get a chance to!