Americaaa!

Well, this is another blog post after so many days...

And what made me write is the short business trip to the United States. Yes, I got the opportunity to visit the strongest country of the world! I should say that it was indeed worth the wait.

I won't go much into the details of how I ended up in the US, but would like to share a few observations about the US that really made me reflect on the work culture and my lifestyle in Japan.

First thing I noticed was there was no sense of unnecessary haste or tension. If you are in Japan, you can observe people under a very weird pressure that really gets on your nerves. In the US, however, things are all taken lightly and people are very informal.

Another important thing I learnt in Dallas was “Hey! How ya doin'?” Yeah! This is the way you greet each other in Dallas. More formal ways like “Good Morning” and all are not really in vogue. So I really loved it, because of two reasons. One, that this created a kind of informal atmosphere and sense of ease for everyone and two, that you could say this to anyone with whom you would make eye-contact. I can assure you, if you do this in Japan, what you will get is just a big frown, or simply no reaction.

Dallas Fort Worth area is a nice place to be in, provided you have a car to travel around. It was amazing to see a virtually haunted town when I tried to walk around the Downtown area on Saturday. But Uptown was bustling with activity as it was a Halloween Weekend. I have updated the pics on my Facebook account and was almost posting comments in real time, thanks to the good internet infrastructure in the city.

On the whole, the visit to US was really great. On work front, some objectives were attained. On personal front, it was great to visit Texas, a very friendly place. Looking forward to more and more visits. Am in Narita Express now, homebound for Diwali celebrations in the evening. Hope I'll keep posting more frequently.

Happy Diwali! (Kinda late though ;-)