My feet finally touched the ground on friday night. The combination of hard work, jet lag, a couple of late nights, culture shock, and the fact that all my friends are fast asleep when I get home from work meant I got home, slept for a bit, then went back into the office for a diversion.

OK so here are some of the strangenesses of being here.

Everything tastes odd. Now, I can handle the idea of there being local cuisine, but even the bread is funny here, kinda sweet. I was crushed last night when I broke into “Trader Joe’s Crown Of Rolls” which was off a shelf full of baguettes, pains rustiques and other “eurotica” and it tased, well, “mexican”. Friday was not a good day, gastronomically. At lunch time I’d made it down to trader joes with the recommendation that it wasn’t a regular store, and was fascinated by the range of stuff they had there, lots of organic stuff, and interesting products from around the world. I had hoped to get enough ingredients to rustle up a nutritous stir fry as well as grabbing something to eat for lunch. In the UK I find it a little irritating how you can’t really buy for one. In america, or at least in trader joe’s, everything comes in large net bags with about 5 people’s worth of stuff. So I came home with two ‘colossal’ bulbs of garlic and more ginger than I use in 6 months. For lunch I got my first ever burrito, for microwaving, and some papaya strips for afterwards. I managed to blow up the burrito and in any case it wasn’t all that pleasant. I’ve never been impressed by mexican food but I doggedly insist on giving it a chance to be anything other than mashed up brown gunk wrapped in something floury.

You can’t drink the tap water. Well you can, but it tastes funny. You can buy huge plastic bottles of water though,which are tasty.

It’s actually hard work to watch TV. A few nights I’ve tried to crash in front of the TV and it’s extremely stressful! Midweek Viswanadh and I watched die-hard and instead of 15-20 mins of movie followed by 3 minutes of adverts, it was more like 10 of movie and 8 of adverts. There were two people presenting the movie and they showed up every end-of-part and showed us some of the DvD extras before we could see the next bit of the movie. It completely screwed the pace of the film and I ended up doing my laundry and ironing without missing any of it!

Did I mention everything tastes funny? I had a tortilla wrap on my first day here, which smelled of the garbage. It’s coming to something when you start going to curry houses to avoid the strange local flavours… but some to think of it, their take on a chapati was distinctly… “mexican”. Actually that’s really baffling, cos a chapati is a lot like a tortilla, whereas the ones in the restaurant were just thin naan bread.

I don’t have a phone! The apartment’s phone is hobbled for long distance calls and the mobile LiveDevices gave me doesn’t work over here. Duh.

I don’t have internet! The radio is my only solace so far and I can feel the novelty wearing off with that too.

The apartment! My room has a light switch but no light. The bedside light is over the far side of the room and there are blinds but no nets, so I end up leaving the light on half the time to save stubbing my toes. There’s a weird central heating fan outside my bedroom door that likes to come on in the middle of the night for 20 seconds at a time. The cooker is all-singing all-dancing and after a week I think I have most of it figured out. I made a pizza in there last night with moderate success. No coat hangers, no plate rack, no light in the lounge! no video/dvd player… hmm I wonder if I can pick up a cheap playstation 2 or something downtown and expense it….