Flight from Amsterdam to Irvine

With lots of clutter and last-minute hiccups I managed to reach Irvine safely. I have to say the experience was very good. I was supposed to reach the house at 8.00pm on Friday but only reached at 12.00 midnight. Matt, my house mate whom I have not met before and known only since few days, remained awake until my arrival. He was so kind to do many things for me before I reached the apartment. Even without me asking him, he had arranged for some light bulb in my room (it did not have a bulb); he arranged for two pillows and a bed sheet and also helped in moving my luggage which was obviously very heavy. Very considerate and nice person I would say (Not just because he had helped me, but also he appears to be). The apartment which I am going to share with Matt has been recently build, so it is a brand new building. It contains a big kitchen, a big bathroom, two medium sized bedrooms and a decent living room. Overall, the locality appears to be great. Various beaches are located only 15 minutes by car. I have not visited any beaches yet but seems to be very beautiful. The campus is also very big with lots of parks and space and also looks very well managed. I will try to include some snaps latter. Over the next week I will have enough time to recover from the travel and lifestyle shock before the start of the semeseter.

During the flight journey, I missed by a slim margin the chance of getting a free ticket for a musical concert at Las Vegas after an in-flight puzzle contest. The passengers in the plane were asked to guess the weight of the plane when it was ready to fly. The following data where provided: weight of totally empty plane (98240 lbs), number of people onboard (136), the quantity of fuel in the tank (5073 gallon) before flying. A ship simulation engineer sitting near me gave the following useful conversions for estimating the final weight of the plane: 2.2 lbs is 1kg, 1 gallon is 4.02 liters (this as wrong, 1 gallon is 3.8 liters) and 1 liter of plane fuel weighs 0.76 kg. I estimated the weight to be 161000 lbs. The winning answer was 163000 lbs and correct answer was 164000 lbs. Anyway the puzzle was exciting. The simulation engineer assumed the average weight of the passenger to be 77 kg. I just walked up and down the flight and guessed that the average weight of the people on board to be 65 kg (as the flight was dominated by non-american women and quite some number of kids)

All through the flight, instead of looking ahead at the things to be done in the future in the university, my mind was replaying various incidents that happened before I left Holland. I wondered many times whether I was insane to make such drastic move of leaving a stable job and a nice company for a totally unknown future. I thought people around would consider that I am a nut to take such eccentric action. I was seeing some kind of strange similarity between me and vijayakanth, who was jumping into bloody politics world.

Also the mind was replaying the final few days at Eindhoven. The final farewell party from my office colleagues with embarrassing number of gifts (which I never expected), the surprising house visit of many friends of mine (steef, dim, alex, akash, milind etc) in the last day before departure for a final adieu, and the last hour intense discussion with vinay (eindhoven housemate).