The ice-breaker!

My USA Chronicles: Part two and 2.5

            After I reached my vacation rental (yes, that's what they called it), the day did not end. The place was pretty cold but the app where I checked-in said there was a thermostat in there. Not knowing what it looked like, I groped around all the walls in the suite and finally located a plastic dabba with a knob. Damn the Fahrenheit conversions, it took me a few seconds to realise the temperature was supposed to be comfortable even without converting to Celsius. As I walked around, I found that the bedroom was warmer than the hall. I mentally solved some equations for heat and mass transfer, Newton's cooling curve, fluid mechanics and thermodynamics and found the source of the problem. Just kidding... I straightaway checked the windows and saw that the previous user had not shut the door properly. After I fixed that, the room slowly began to warm.

View from the window (irrelevant here, but the pic is so cool to not post!)

            Having got the impression that the previous tenant was dumb, I entered the bathroom to shower. There were no buckets or mugs; instead, there was a showerhead over a bathtub. I thought to myself, "Oh! These efficient buggers!" and stepped in. There was a curtain to cover only the bathtub segment. As expected, the dumb ex-tenant had left the curtain hanging inside the bathtub, allowing it to get wet. Where do these people come from, right? I gently lifted the curtain out of the tub, showered and then stepped out. TADAAAAAA... The shower water had hit the insides of the curtain, dripped down to the bathroom floor outside the tub, flown to the dressing room and trickled into the hallway. The floor being wooden, I don't know if water had even seeped to the roof below me. I mopped all the litres of water, silently apologised to the unknown ex-tenant for calling them dumb and put the curtain back into the bathtub where it rightfully belonged.

            There was an evening "welcome mixer" session at the conference. It was meant to be an icebreaker for people to chill-out and blend-in. I was already running late but was very thirsty since I had emptied my water bottle earlier. I had learnt from the movies that the kitchen water in the US was potable. And in the last several hours, I had encountered different kinds of taps in sinks and basins at the airports. However, most of them had the same convention - rotate left to get hot water and rotate right to get cold water. I was subliminally trained to follow this with my kitchen tap. No water came. I tilted the tap right, left, centre, hit on its head, and repeated the sequence. No water. Being an engineer, like most Indians (I also have a degree, though), I opened the cupboard underneath to check the pipes. I randomly rotated some valve and found that was for the "kitchen waste disposer". One after another I turned some valves and then water started dripping from the valve, but not from the tap. Having established that the water supply was not an issue and there was something wrong with the tap, I gave up repairing it further. I mean, as a detective I had figured the source of the problem. It was now a child's play for someone else to fix it. So I called the office but they had all left for the day. Being the good person I am, I called my roommate, who was on his way from the airport, to buy a bottle of water for himself for the night. The poor guy asked for his van to be stopped in the middle of the highway, in the freezing cold, and bought a bottle of liquid water and came home shivering. I told him about the complex tap issue and how I managed to identify that the problem was idiopathic. He just walked to the sink and pulled the tap. Water gushed out like Niagara Falls. Wait, WHAT??? No one told me t... Never mind. That's okay. Not a big deal. Shit happens! I just acted surprised and left.

That two-faced tap. Grrr.

            I walked 2-3 minutes to the conference centre which was just across the highway. This time, for the first time, I had packed myself in all the warm clothes I had. I could hardly feel I had a backpack on my back because it was a foot away from my actual back. I went in, expecting people to greet me with rose water, garland and toffees. No one gave a damn. I spotted some familiar Indian faces from earlier that day and hung around with them. By now everyone was holding differently shaped glasses with liquids of different colours. I suddenly remembered the "Free Drink" coupon we were given during the registration. I proudly marched up to the bartender and asked in a grown-up voice and fake American accent, "Excuse me? Do you have any non-alcoholic beverages?". The guy first searched for me and then looked at me and pointed at the table. There were several brands and Pepsi was one among them. I should have first thought why there was exactly one can of every drink on the table. But I did not. I grabbed the Pepsi can and thanked the bartender. He was so surprised and shocked and politely said, "I am sorry sir, those are just for display. I'll give you a different one.". Completely unrelated, but in the next fraction of a second, I remembered a shopkeeper tell a toddler, "No kiddo, that toy is a showpiece. Ask mamma to buy you another one". But like I said, that was a completely unrelated thought. So now I too had a glass of cryptic brown liquid. I just left people guessing what I was drinking.

            After slowly sipping from the transparent silica container filled with non-transparent, non-opaque, brown, sweetened carbonated water, I wanted to eat something. I heard that people ate healthy there. So I waded through a very crowded hall, found a table with uneaten food and brought some cucumber and broccoli. Cucumber did not go well with Pepsi. So I switched to the next obvious healthy item and sunk my teeth into the broccoli. Yum...YUCK! IT WAS RAW! Not even boiled. I felt like I had fallen flat on my tummy on a dirty grassy garden with my mouth open. Who cared if it was uncouth - I quietly put the bitten broccoli back on the plate and left it unattended on an unattended table and went back to drinking my sweetened water; by now the carbon dioxide was gone. In the meantime, my friends had finished eating and having two rounds of alcoholic beverages and were ready to leave. So I again found my way to another abandoned table to put my empty glass and walked backwards. I heard someone shout way behind me and I turned back to realise I had bumped into somebody with my backpack that was a foot behind my back. I did not even check if I spilt his expensive drink. I just said, "I am so sorry!" and non-invasively stormed through the rest of the crowd and went outside the building. I could not take any more embarrassment in there since I had to face these people for the next 4 days. After going out in the cold I started re-packing myself amateurishly with all the winter gear from my insensitive backpack.

            Four of us were walking back to our places of stay. It was literally freezing cold. So to keep us occupied while we walked, I was narrating how all I embarrassed myself in there and how badly I wanted to get out of that place. I was perhaps a bit loud while describing the events, that a stranger walking a few feet behind us might have been silently laughing. Or she minded her own business and completely ignored us altogether. Until... one of the girls climbing down the stairs in front of me stepped on solid glassy ice and slipped. She fell on her back and slid down one more step. Ouch! I was like, "What? Seriously? Wait, let me help y..." and THUD! I was lying on my back, enjoying the stargaze. As usual, my back didn't feel the ice it cracked on the floor because of the foot-wide padding. The irony was that the two people who were standing steady in front of us were the ones who had actually consumed alcohol. They helped us back on our feet. There I was, completely satiated for the day, going back home after a literal "ice-breaking" session!

The innocent dry staircase

The wicked staircase. Imagine its wickedness at night!

Stay tuned. More to come...!