2 Cities
Labisha Uprety, a SUSI student who recently returned to her home country of Nepal, shares her perspective on the first two legs of the SUSI trip: Seattle and Chicago.
Over the last month, students from Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka were in Seattle for a new program coordinated by FIUTS, the Study of the U.S. Institute for Student Leaders in Journalism and New Media (SUSI). Each student has written a blog post about the experience. Here's a post by Labisha Uprety from Nepal about her time in Seattle and Chicago:
Seattle is a shy guy.
A haranguing 29-hour flight later, all you want is your mother. Or good food, someone to fuss over you and finger-comb your hair.
Instead, we had Tom give us a zip lock containing an apple, a banana and granola bars near midnight and guiltily inform us that restaurants closed early on Sundays on the ‘Ave’.
(Which was just as well, considering I came to love granola bars and crunch on them pretty much all the time, driving my new roommate crazy with all the crunching noises when she would be trying to riffle through her beloved Zadie Smith, who I likened to Jane Austen, which only drove her more nuts.)
I want to say that the moment I first looked out of my window of 458 - Alder Commons, I saw Mount Rainier on one side and the city sprawling underneath, or more appropriately, alongside it. But all I could see was a hazy fog in the distance and incredibly bright sunlight at 10:12 p.m. Unnerving for someone who is used to darkness by 6:00.
Did this mean that night lasted ‘till 9 in the morning here? I was beginning to feel like this city wasn’t too sure of itself.
Labisha (center) with other SUSI participants Mitali Prakash Rathod (left) and Zenisha Gonsalves (right) in front of the Ferris Wheel in downtown Seattle
A few days of uncertain food choices and time-management issues followed. My fancy shoes never saw daylight for some reason, hence bathroom slippers for classes. Yes people, now you know why I wore those red-striped flip-flops everywhere. Or as Mike used to call them, sandals.
Sleep cycles were effectively reversed. Chai was found (hurrah!) and in between trying to find the perfect rating of ‘hot’ for Panang curry, so was Seattle. He was a tall fair guy who wore light button-up shirts which he left open at the collar and beige trousers that never seemed to get dirty despite their dirty color. I saw him talk about legislations on legalizing marijuana and I saw him secretly roll up a joint and blow smoke into the pristine air that he was so proud of in the daylight. I hid behind musty bookshelves and discovered that he liked Bukowski and read it while no one was watching; profane verses of poetry hid behind ‘Entrepreneurial Journalism Vol.1’. I saw that he sometimes liked to live in 3-bedroom houses with running hot water and central heating and other times, on unoccupied park benches or on streets, rolled up in his rags, mostly under steel plates that screamed street names.
You know the likes of men like these; they need to be nudged or even elbowed sometimes for them to take notice of you. I had to go mountain climbing almost barefoot to please him (read: forgot shoes again). I had to forsake my bed and sleep on dew-riddled grass on the side of a lake to get to know him better. Not to mention having to whip my hair and stomp my feet around a blazing campfire like Shivaji; sans a snake wrapped around my neck.
But it worked.
I knew he liked me too the day a stranger came up to me and asked me for directions to a good place to eat, 3 weeks into living in Seattle. How incredulous that I should be asked for directions when I barely knew how to make my way back into Alder!
How wonderfully incredulous. I knew Seattle had taken notice then. I happily gave directions, but I am unsure if they were correct. Oh well. Only so much you can know in a month.
Chicago wore neon sneakers.
Seattle settled into its old cool as I left. He kissed me goodbye and I left with hopes to maybe look him up again.
People were sad around me. Everyone had had their share of affairs with Seattle.
4 hours later, Chicago.
And it slapped me the moment I got out of the airport; into the shuttle bus and the driver turned on the radio.
What was that?
Jazz?
Blues?
Eddie Veddar marrying hip-hop?!
And what am I looking at from these moving window panes? The average 1950’s American movie?
Zenisha besides me kept crying “FULL HOUSE! FULL HOUSE!”, naming the emotion that Chicago induced in her, when everyone knows Full House wasn’t filmed in Chicago. It just looked like it may have been.
Chicago pulled out your tongue and stuck it to its sidewalks. A midnight stroll later, I perfectly expected the Bee Gees to come up behind me and begin singing ‘Saturday Night Fever’, and then everyone would follow step, clicking our fingers together and tapping our new-looking shoes in the middle of traffic. That did not happen. But that does not matter. The point is it could have.
Chicago was a shirtless tan guy in bright shorts and a matching fedora. He ran alongside you in the musty underground and laughed loud and obnoxious as cars pulled up and cops piled out onto pitch dark streets below our hotel rooms. He played drums out of old buckets in the middle of traffic and held out another bucket for money. He demanded your attention,and you gave it to him.
(American Gothic - Photo by Labisha Uprety)
My roommate is one of those annoying people who will moan and grumble at the idea of going outside in the sun, preferring to keep her nose buried in her tablet and be comforted by the artificial cool of her room but transforming into this excited squirrel when I drag her to see the likes of ‘American Gothic’ and Rubens; posting photos on social media like it was her idea all along. We took a yellow cab to the Art Institute of Chicago like real city people, being inappropriate amounts excited at our supposed chic. Little did we know we would be repeating the yellow cab adventure when we were running late for our group tour at Navy Pier, having to tip the driver far too much to get to a place that was literally 3 minutes away. And again, when Mitali was in her element and tried outrunning everyone to get to the hotel first with us in tow; only to circle Magnificent Mile for more than an hour before we had to slump into another yellow cab and be driven two blocks south.
But that may also be because I kept asking directions to ‘Maleficent Mile’ for some reason. Everybody likes Angelina Jolie.
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The Study of the U.S. Institutes (SUSI), sponsored by the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, promote a better understanding of the people, institutions, and culture of the United States among foreign students, teachers, and scholars. Study of the U.S. Institutes are short-term academic programs for groups of undergraduate leaders, educators, and scholars from around the world.
The program in Seattle is coordinated by the Foundation for International Understanding Through Students (FIUTS), a local non-profit organization affiliated with the University of Washington that promotes international friendship and cross-cultural understanding in the region. The Seattle Globalist, a daily publication covering the connections between Seattle and the rest of the globe, is collaborating with FIUTS to deliver courses on topics in journalism and new media.