Here cometh the fledgling academic.
Hi. This is your humble correspondent reporting from Bloomington, Indiana, in the United States of America, home to Indiana University's lovely campus. My purpose here is to begin the Ph.D. programme in Computer Science this spring term and thus generally have a mix of nice time and miserable time for the next few years. I was admitted for the fall term but had to defer it to spring due to various, umm, circumstances. I do miss home, Bangalore, and the tropical country weather, but Bloomington is such a pretty little university town and should adequately compensate for all feelings of nostalgia and homesickness.
At the time of writing, there's still 24 minutes left to the end of January 1, and that is barely enough time left to wish a rather belated happy new year to the few people still reading this livejournal thing. So, happy new year, yo.
I reached here on Friday, early in the morning, after a short-ish flight, another long-ish and delayed flight, some missing piece of luggage from this long-ish flight (lesson learned: the next time, distribute the underwear evenly into every piece of luggage you have; also: give up on Air India already), then a cancelled flight, some twelve hours of waiting in Chicago airport, and then another short-ish flight to Indianapolis and then an hour-long cab ride to Bloomington. I'd been checking weather reports for the last couple of months, worrying that I might freeze to death the moment I step out of the artificially warmed interiors of one of these airports, but that hasn't happened yet. The day I came here, it actually turned out to be quite warm (12° C), but it's been getting colder again. Right now, the town is very quiet; in a week or so it's going to teem with students again; I get to enjoy the peace and quiet and cold in the meanwhile. I'm looking for a place to live, so I'm also knocking on various doors and annoying various people.
My film stash and a couple of film cameras have survived the trip, but at this point I don't know how much of the film photography obsession a poor, impoverished, sleep-deprived graduate student could afford. Let's hope for the best!