I landed in College Station in Texas in 2001. Fresh off the boat from Mumbai. Sniffing the US air for the first time. Jet-lagged. Excited.
And I had the (reverse) culture shock of a lifetime. Places shutdown early, there were no tall buildings, if you said the F-word (even in talking to your friends in public), wide-eyed Texan girls would turn to stare at you like you had committed a crime... was this place for real? I went from big bustling megalopolis to rural USA! Welcome to College Station, Texas - home of Texas A&M University. (Ranked as politically the most conservative in recent studies.)
So my next worry was about food. While I was more than prepared to fend for myself by cooking on my own (a typical graduate student thing if you are from an International country), I still loved eating out and exploring food options, so the thought of not being able to do that in College Station worried me in those initial days.
Needless to say, two years and a Master's degree later, I had explored food and more food in this rural college town and had no bad experiences. Well maybe the one time when I ate at Chilli's for the first time and told them to get me a bean burger, but after I bit into it, I realized it was a beef (aargggh) patty!
College Station isn't half as bad as I made it out to me in the beginning of this post, especially because a lot of immigrants from Asia choose to live there after retirement due to real estate prices and the easy lifestyle, many of them opening up restaurants with quite authentic tasting food.
Some of my best memories include eating at Dr. Grewal's parties when Dr. Grewal and some other grad students who were excellent cooks, made some really good Indian food. Dr. Grewal was a professor at A&M and his wife Amerika (Latina) was the Graduate Student Advisor for our MIS program in the B-school. So some of us lucky grad desi students who worked with either of them got invited to the parties and what parties they were! Great Indian food, Indian movies on their big-screen (wait - make that "big-ass" screen) TV, etc.
Over the course of the next few posts, I'll try to talk about how I ate my veggie way through College Station, Texas and enjoyed every bit of it too from the hot, hot, Thai-Phillipino food, to some very authentic Chinese food and not to mention, home-style cooked piping hot Indian food.
And I had the (reverse) culture shock of a lifetime. Places shutdown early, there were no tall buildings, if you said the F-word (even in talking to your friends in public), wide-eyed Texan girls would turn to stare at you like you had committed a crime... was this place for real? I went from big bustling megalopolis to rural USA! Welcome to College Station, Texas - home of Texas A&M University. (Ranked as politically the most conservative in recent studies.)
So my next worry was about food. While I was more than prepared to fend for myself by cooking on my own (a typical graduate student thing if you are from an International country), I still loved eating out and exploring food options, so the thought of not being able to do that in College Station worried me in those initial days.
Needless to say, two years and a Master's degree later, I had explored food and more food in this rural college town and had no bad experiences. Well maybe the one time when I ate at Chilli's for the first time and told them to get me a bean burger, but after I bit into it, I realized it was a beef (aargggh) patty!
College Station isn't half as bad as I made it out to me in the beginning of this post, especially because a lot of immigrants from Asia choose to live there after retirement due to real estate prices and the easy lifestyle, many of them opening up restaurants with quite authentic tasting food.
Some of my best memories include eating at Dr. Grewal's parties when Dr. Grewal and some other grad students who were excellent cooks, made some really good Indian food. Dr. Grewal was a professor at A&M and his wife Amerika (Latina) was the Graduate Student Advisor for our MIS program in the B-school. So some of us lucky grad desi students who worked with either of them got invited to the parties and what parties they were! Great Indian food, Indian movies on their big-screen (wait - make that "big-ass" screen) TV, etc.
Over the course of the next few posts, I'll try to talk about how I ate my veggie way through College Station, Texas and enjoyed every bit of it too from the hot, hot, Thai-Phillipino food, to some very authentic Chinese food and not to mention, home-style cooked piping hot Indian food.
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