Living in the Bay Area -- 1.

We lived for more than a decade in Lexington, KY and we lived for a little more than a year in Alpharetta, GA. Compared to the pace of living in the suburbs in these cities, living in the Bay Area is like switching gait from a leisurely stroll to a 100-metre sprint. I don't know if the change in pace is also  because we are trying to juggle everything with 2 kids instead of 1. Perhaps, a little bit but I think the reason k & I feel kind of knocked out of breath here is just a reaction to moving to Silicon Valley.

The Bay Area is everything I had imagined it to be. Pleasant (weather wise; I was losing it in the East Coast -- I self-diagnosed myself with SAD years back), exciting (career wise -- oh boy!), familiar (it just feels better knowing friends and family are nearby; we might not hang out every weekend but the knowledge is sufficient to make a place feel like home) and fun (Places to eat, things to do!)...but, it is also more restless, less friendlier and kind of relentless. Let me explain.

Restless because everyone seems to be in a rush. Sort of like:



The context doesn't apply but you know what I mean :p

Friendliness: This sort of relates to everyone feeling rushed. It rubs on everyone they interact with and it feels like I live in a web of constantly buzzing busy bees that have little time to...smell the flowers and take a break. A typical family has the mom and dad working full day picking up their kids after work and then all they seem to have time for is a rushed, distracted evening and night routine. Play outside -- check, dinner -- check, bath -- check, story-time -- check, off you go to bed! Everyone is a little bit on the edge all the time, talk a little bit faster and the next->next->next loop wears you out at the end of the day. k and I have tried our best to maintain the fabled work-life balance. We shall see how long we last with our outdated philosophies here on the west coast! But, I digress. I miss the southern courtesy and the drawl and the relaxed pace of life. For the first time since I migrated to the US, I have switched back to speaking fast (the way I used to when I had just come to the US and my students -- I taught Math as a teaching assistant -- asked me to slow down!)

Relentless: k says I don't always have to try to make things more efficient and carry out process or self improvements all the time. But, am afraid that is part of who I am :/ I love my dose of books and movies but I question everything I do in my 'free time'. Typically, if it is not parenting/work/writing, I question it and see if I really need to be doing it. I take this to great extremes -- I try to delegate every other routine matter in the house to a software (preferably) or to someone who would gladly get paid to do it (House keeping, laundry, cleaning, dishes). But, I digress again (then again, what's the point of a personal blog if you can't ramble on?). Here, more than anywhere else I have lived, I get the feeling that I have to constantly improve myself and strive to be better at what I am already good at in order to succeed (at work) and keep pace with all the other smart folks around me.

But, there is no denying it. It is an exciting time to live in Silicon Valley and am afraid I wouldn't be able to leave even if I wished to at some point in the future.

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On moving and settling down.

So, we moved to Alpharetta almost 9 months back. We have gone through excitement, boredom, denial, almost-feels-like-home, jeez-we-have-no-friends...and many more phases representing a range from emotions from the totally anticipated to the entirely unexpected. I thought I should note down how I feel now and revisit after a period of time to see if anything has changed.

The first 3 months: were about saying good bye, nostalgia, remnant excitement from arangetram and from quitting IBM and moving on to a better job, adrenalin mixed with exhaustion from the move and the staying in a motel and the move again to an apartment.


The biggie was getting r~ settled into a preschool. I was definitely more apprehensive about that than my first day of work. The initial months were about figuring out where to get food (What is a Publix?!), where are the Indian grocery stores (we get chat here, paav bhaji with Tamil movie songs playing in the background!), beauty parlor (right next to HotBreads, now renamed Cake World) where I don't go any longer -- that's a long story, where to get clothes (there is a carousel in the mall and cup cakes and a train!) -- this we had to figure out as soon as we realized r's school required uniforms (was I back in Chennai?) Around this time, I met my friend from Bits, Pilani, A~ who filled in the gaps for me. An Indian co-worker of mine gave me the inside info about restaurants in the area and such. 


During this time, we went to Atlanta almost every weekend and tried to get a feel for the city (if we weren't in Atlanta, we were in Lex!) We didn't have any friends to speak of, so might as well get to know the city, right? We were regulars at the Children's museum (rocks!), Chatpati and related Indian restaurants in the area. We checked out the puppetry center for arts, an art studio for kids, a farm with animals to pet + a bonus art class...


r~ celebrated her first birthday in school (with Simba)!


There was not much time to think. The moving was done but the momentum didn't slow down...yet.

My artist at Purple Hippo Art Studio

Simba and Nala chilling out at our apartment!

The next 3 months: r~ was well-settled in school and I, at work. k was all set with his home office. Our trips to Atlanta had slowed down and we had info about all the essential services we needed. We continued exploring, went on a wild animal safari...That's when it usually begins right? The urge to change things just when everything seemed to touch a semblance of sanity. We started discovering small annoyances with the apartment -- the dish washer coughed up black gook every now and then (the apartment service folks rocked though), we were lucky to get a ground-floor apartment with an attached garage but there was hardly any sunlight in the living room -- and I thought I was running away from minor-SAD-symptoms in Lex. The reduction in living space didn't make much of a difference (surprisingly) and I loved the single-level layout but I felt the need to decorate the apartment so it was more home-like. We had friends visiting us from Lex and that was fun but we missed 'hanging out' -- something that k and I had an insatiable appetite for, in Lex. I got to know my office colleagues better and A~ better, attended a bunch of school birthday parties with r~ (where I, like my daughter, did not manage to make any new friends). I got to know the pani-puri aunty well ( we were there almost twice a week). 


r~ decided to join a paatu class -- my little girl was taking her own decisions! Another friend from Bits, also A~, told me about a bal vikas class that r~ might enjoy. So, we took r~ to Atlanta every Sunday for the class. She refused to stay alone in class which meant managing her for 2-3 hours without hopefully too many embarrassing moments. By the time, we ate and came back, it was 4-5 hours taken from our Sundays -- which was a nice way to spend Sundays since there wasn't much else to do anyways except house hunting! Around this time, I decided we had to buy a house and so the rest of the weekends and a considerable part of our work lunch time was spent looking at ranch houses. We needed a single level home, close to work and close to school, at least 3 BR and in reasonable condition. Turns out, that was not easy to find because not many people built ranch houses nowadays! Finally, we did find one soon after we decided to take a break from house hunting :)

Wild Animal Safari

And that brings us to now: we moved yet again, celebrated the new year and my birthday. I was at home, at work -- you know what I mean. r~ was at home at school. k~, well, he is at home, at work, anyways :) We talked a  bit about r2i and m2b (move to bay area :p) but decided we needed against it for the next few years. I liked my work and r~ liked her school. The place was definitely more happening and had access to a lot of fun things to do, the weather was better...so what's the catch, you ask? Friends, of course. Making friends, when you are no longer studying somewhere, it turns out, is hard. We met people we could hang out with but that's different from hanging out with close friends...


k's parents are here to visit us and that always helps w.r.t home sickness (where is home anyway? India, Lex, here?) We finally joined the local library and I felt like I could breathe a little bit easier -- felt like a missing puzzle piece fell in place. We went to a neat build your own car class at Home Depot..met a few more people, who could potentially become friends, and felt better. k, though, misses friends at Lex, the swing in our backyard, the sand box he built for r~...


We went without TV for 8 months and hardly noticed the difference, we bought a TV and then returned it, bought another and returned it and are now TV less again and surprisingly still not missing it but I think this time, we will buy a TV and not return it.


r~ made some almost-real friends, I saw her initiate and ask questions to her teacher (by herself! Huge deal...for me), today she asked me if she could go to school (either she likes school or k and I have become boring versions of ourselves here!)...


And we are back to spending inordinate amounts of time about trivial enhancements to the house -- which means, we are almost home...


Time will tell.

@Home Depot -- that week's show & tell for school!

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On moving and moving on...

This post has been a long time coming but glad to write now about it. The past couple of months have been eventful -- quitting IBM, preparing for interviews, arangetram, moving to Alpharetta (or should I say Alphapet? So many desis here, it could be Alwarpet ;) and leaving Lex and Lex, I guess, is the focus of this post now. The rest will find their way to this space sooner or later!

It's true that I was ready and I do mean, really ready to leave Lex after 11 years of making it my home. There were a multitude of reasons for my wanting to leave Lex but having said that, there are a number of reasons why Lex is, to reuse an overused adjective, pretty awesome! It's been a few weeks here and I still haven't found a library as attractive and close to home, or a Kroger that's 2 mins away! And I truly miss Joseph Beth, our defacto hang out place for the past several years now.

But a place is after all a place and it's the people really that matter. And people are what I miss most about Lex. It's not like I dropped by my friends' homes every other day but weekends usually found us in a friend's home or them in our home and it was...good, familiar, comfortable...like home. Even if some weeks all I did was talk to them on the phone, it was knowing that people who knew me for my quirks and craziness(es) were nearby should I need to see them. The wise folks online tell me it takes anywhere between a year to two years to call a place your home, sometimes never. A year seems far away now. I asked k if we should call a friend's contact here, you know, just to make new friends and he said, "It should just happen else it's artificial" :p

So weekends here find us in the mall (there is a carousal in the mall and a train, a real train for kids!) or Hotbreads (paav bhaji and veggie-puffs) or India plaza (yes, they have the latest Tamil movies) or in one of the umpteen Indian restaurants here, all of which are a stone's throw away. Fill friends in on this equation and we are set for life.

But.

It is harder to reach out to people and make friends as we grow older and for desis here with siblings back in India, that becomes a necessity. Friends are our family here, right? And with work being more challenging (and fun -- which translates to time consuming because you spend more time working for two solid reasons now!), I wonder when the whole forming-a-community here will work out. The moving is easy (k would disagree since he did all the work). It's the moving on that's harder. Perhaps, like k says, it will happen one day, naturally and without any special effort on my part. Who knows? Meanwhile, a glimpse of Alphapet :)

Need I say more?

Hotbreads!

Really neat restaurant where k and I had our rare couple-lunch-- Never enough thyme.

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