Month: February 2019

#PuntSeattle: 3. I have an Ikea!

Posted on by thepuntasticlife

A snapshot of my WIP living room

Like I said, I recently relocated to the US. And like any other married couple, we moved into a new apartment. A nice one bedroom apartment, located in the heart of downtown Seattle, per my request, so that I can at least see human beings around and not feel too secluded in a new country. 

Now, new apartment basically by default means that you need to do it up from scratch. So there’s a lot of planning and shopping to do, furniture shopping being by far the most critical task on the list. For most people of my age group, when you hear the words “furniture shopping”, there is a default setting that takes you to the most obvious answer — IKEA!

Surprisingly, even though I’ve travelled outside India often before, I had never really been to Ikea before I moved here. And after hearing everyone tell me it’s so great and it’s so fun, I was genuinely excited to go there for the very first time! The stores are usually massive and located in somewhat outskirt areas to allow for the space they need to set up. And so we drove out to Ikea with a mental list of items in place. Typically in the US, apartments aren’t very logically laid-out in terms of floor plans (!), so you need to really think about how the look and feel you want to give your place and buy furniture accordingly, and smartly. But it gives way to lots of great and creative ideas!

Okay, now for those of you who are not too familiar with the whole USP of stores like Ikea and Walmart for furniture — they’re good quality, decently priced pieces of furniture that you can buy when you aren’t a rich person in the US. BUT…here’s the catch — you have to assemble it yourself!! Sounding good yet? 😉

Alright. Here I now introduce you to the most widely told lie by Indians who have moved here — “I know it’s a task, but building your own furniture is fun! I like it!” 

Lie. LIE!

Guys, most of you are lying! We come from India, a country where if you buy furniture, you are never expected to BUILD it, it is built for you by default and also without a charge! Living in the US is great, but every Indian misses home in these situations 😛 Labour in India is wayyy cheaper and you are not charged for every little thing, and everybody loves that, you do. Stop lying.

Anyway, in continuation, Ikea really does have great furniture and a lot of options and it’s so fun picking out things that turn an apartment into a home! You need to take out at least a few hours of your day to have a chance to look through the whole store, because there’s so much to see and choose and contemplate! Really cute and quirky stuff!

So the way it works is, every item comes with a tag that mentions the exact aisle location of where it is stored in the warehouse below. Once you choose, you go pick it up from said location, pay, load boxes into a truck you can rent for the day and take your stuff home to build it. It sounds like a lot of work, right? So, to be fair they DO have options to make it easier for you. 

Option B would be that you bill up and pay for everything you want, with an additional charge of $60 for home delivery of your furniture. Easy! But no. If you want the staff to actually pick up your items from the warehouse FOR you, please shell out $30 more! Nothing’s free in the US okay? To be fair though, this $60 and $30 covers as many items as you buy in that one time so it’s still okay. 

We bought quite a few pieces of furniture, scheduled the delivery and all was good. We actually DID build most of the furniture we bought, with some much appreciated help from friends! And honestly, it really is an experience that should be given a fair try at least once. But after discovering a faulty component in the TV table, buiding a bed that took 4 hours with a headboard that wouldn’t fit because of some fault too, we decided that we’re not the type of people who have fun building our furniture. I honestly don’t care if you call me spoilt at this point. Because let me tell you that even after paying the $60+$30 fee, we had to go BACK to the Ikea store to exchange the faulty piece that ideally they should have delivered themselves, being that it was a company error. 

But all’s well that ends well! We requested for a professional to come help assemble the remaining 2 pieces of furniture (you have to pay for that too :P) and now I love the way my apartment’s shaping up. And I have a constant inflow of new ideas of how to make it better, so its definitely fun to set up your own home for the very first time! So the point is, live and learn, I guess!

(But I still prefer the Indian way of working when it comes to these things and I have no shame in admitting this! :P) More to come soon….

#PuntSeattle: 2. Everyone makes mistakes!

Posted on by thepuntasticlife

Shopping for groceries and buying food in America can prove to be many things — exciting, challenging, confusing, sometimes even infuriating, more-so if you’re new here. I will take you on this roller coaster ride in detail sometime soon, for sure. In the meanwhile, let me narrate to you my recent fun Sunday lunch episode.

I should start this story by mentioning that I come from a family of highly social people. We need people surrounding us as much as possible to keep our state of mind in the “Sane” setting. Love calling them over and feeding them even more because we’re followers of the “full stomach makes happy person” ideology!

So to normalise life here for me, I invited a few friends over for a chilled Sunday lunch. And because it was one of the first real “meals” I was hosting in my apartment, I went grocery shopping. Since I wanted to make a chicken curry, I bought all the essentials I was lacking at home — chicken, yogurt for the marination and some onions. This was my prep done the night before. This curry is pretty much a piece of cake for me so I decided to prepare it on Sunday morning so it would be as fresh as possible.

Cut to Sunday and everything is going according to plan. The chicken was cooking beautifully on the stove, smelling great, and my husband went to make a quick beer run. Now, everyone knows that the cardinal rule of cooking is TASTE EVERYTHING YOU MAKE!! And then I did.

THE CURRY WAS SWEET!

I was absolutely confused, because I remember adding nothing to this curry that would remotely sweeten it! In fact, I had gone the extra mile and made this with the special home-made masala my mom makes back home, which I had taken the efforts of freezing and bringing over across the globe! I kept going over the entire process in my mind again and again, trying to pin-point that mistake that led to this disaster, when suddenly lightning struck.

I had asked my husband to make an onion and yogurt raita (salad) for this curry, as per the practice in India. As he graciously was preparing it to help me out, I grabbed the container of yogurt I had used to marinate the chicken in, and there on the label it was in the finest print…”VANILLA FLAVOURED”. I wanted to hit my head on the wall, seriously!

I thought I was so careful with this in the supermarket! I grabbed the box that was plain white in color, no pictures of any fruit that would indicate any flavoring on it, just said “Calcium and protein enriched”. Usually, anyhting “vanilla flavored” comes with the vanilla pod and flower picture identifier on the container, so this was a retail shock to me.

Aannyway, back to fixing this monstrosity, I basically tried to neutralise the sugar effect by piling on the spices into the curry. Spicing, then tasting again and again till I was satisfied with the taste enough to serve it to company. The onion raita, well, usually a touch of sugar is common so I just added some chilli powder and salt to it and it was good to go.

The REAL test though was when we actually sat down to eat. I’m going to say that the pot being polished off clean and happy lunch guests telling me it tasted great basically means I passed with not-so-bad results! It doesn’t mean that I’m totally proud of myself, but Im also not totally UN-proud of me either! 😛

My point here is, the massive variety for every food available here is the root cause of all of this confusion and there SHOULD have been a pictorial vanilla indicator on the yogurt container, that’s all I’m saying. But it’s been a fun experience, all in all, and after this I still say I like going to the supermarkets here 😛

I hope you have enjoyed my little culinary adventure..more to come soon!

#PuntSeattle! Hashtag is alive!

Posted on by thepuntasticlife

So, moved to Seattle recently. When I say recently, I mean all of 2 weeks! And so I did the usual thing of trying to get my sleep cycle synced to the local time zone and unpacked and blah blah. And then on started my journey of “becoming an NRI”. 

Now, once everyone back home heard I was moving to the U.S., the general reaction was “Oh my God that’s so great! You’re going to love it!” There was also the other part of it, which was stuff like “take lots of warm clothing, Seattle can get cold!”. It’s like okay I know, I can just Google these things! And then there’s the ever-popular “better get used to doing household chores now..no help in America unless you’re really rich!”. So after a point, I think one starts to tune out all of this as white noise, because honeslty, how can you tell if you like a place till you actually move there and live there for a while?

So, for all the general public who thinks America is the bomb and is the place to live, I don’t really disagree with you, nor do I give a 100% agreement stamp. There are various pros and cons to both situations (seriously!), which I might take the time to explain in detail a little bit later. I have my own take on this which I hope I can explain without sounding too condescending. 

See the thing is, I have travelled a little bit around the world and what happened as a result of that was, I never had that fascination of living in the U.S. as I noticed, quite a few people do. This wasn’t as new a world to me as it is to most people who move here from India and so, frankly, a lot of things here don’t surprise me. But then a lot of them still do, so I hope you find my findings interesting!

WORDS.

First of all, there aren’t too many “Shops” here, there are stores. Everytime you walk into a store, a cafe, a bank etc. , someone will very jovially wish you “Good Morning!” or “Good Afternoon!”! Now, you may be used to the greeting, as now they do that in a lot of places back home as well. But what you will notice here is that Americans generally do so quite happily — loudly and with a smile on their face. I remember being very surprised at this the first time I expericed it. Then my dad very NOT diplomatically said, “Americans are the only people who greet you this happily and always ask how you’re doing. It may be a part of their job description at times, but it never fails to make one feel good for being greeted so nicely!” As this custom goes, the conversation is also usually ended with “Have a great evening!” or “Have a great day!” Nice, right?

Another thing is, there is slightly different terminology here that one must get used to, in order to converse with people on a daily basis. Let me lay this out for you. 

For example, when you want something packed up, in India we say “Parcel kar do”, or “it’s for take away”. Nobody will really understand you here so you simply say “It’s to go”. When you want to fuel up your car, you would normally go to a “Gas Station”, not really a Petrol Pump as you would in India. If you ask me, I think it’s still quite unnecessary to refer to fuel like petrol and diesel as “Gas”, but when in Rome, I guess.

Thankfully, chips in America are the same as chips in India, as opposed to England where you would be served thick-cut greasy fries, because chips there are called “Crisps”! BUT soda doesn’t mean Dukes soda, it means any kind of aerated liquid like Coke, Fanta, Sprite etc. If you want the clear soda, you must say CLUB soda, which apparently for some reason isn’t the same as sparkling water. I haven’t really bothered to find out what the difference is. 

The phrase “I’m good” can mean a lot. It can be a way to say “No, thank you” when say, you’re asked by a waitress in a reataurant if you want some more food. It can mean that you have everything you need, for example if a salesperson in a store asks you if they can help you with anything. So you can make it your own, I guess. 

Also, in restaurants, at the end of your meal, you ask for the CHEQUE, not the bill, usually. Although it’s not like people here won’t understand you if you say bill. 

So I think, one of the first ways to get accustomed witht he way of life here is to understand these small nitty gritties, and then you’re one step further to blending in here! There are other observations and experiences I will share but they will be in the soon-to-follow posts. For now, I gotta go get a cup of coffee 😀