It has been a very hectic three weeks and I have not had any chance to blog and most likely it will not happen too often for another few weeks. The reason for this being I am getting acquainted with my new home for time being, Seattle, WA, United States. On top of that a few other minor issues such as final wedding preparations, flat hunting, job searching and immigration paperwork do take a good chunk of my time each day. In other words, between deciding who should sit next to who at the wedding, looking on housingmap and Seattle Times.com, reading different job websites and studying the never ending requirements of INS for getting work visa and social security number and so on makes me lose sleep, but I enjoy it… I enjoy transitional periods, those 6-8 months when you move to another country when everything is up and down and you are trying to organize life to start it all over again.

This also has allowed me to be in a observation mode about my new home town and country. I guess coming from Israel I also have taken some things with me, like the fact that customer service here seems beyond excellent, but then again that is probably because sometimes in Israel I had to first apologize to the store keeper that I wanted to buy something from him, be grateful that he is not yelling at me for entering the store and interrupt his nap or phone conversation with his buddy. Never mind asking him questions about the things he sold. So I guess everything is relative.

Everything is big here, I knew that already based on my past visits as a guest, but now that I am here to stay I am able to see things with a slightly different eyes. The portions at the restaurants for one person could be eaten for three meals. In the parking spots I could fit two cars easily (by Israeli way of parking even three), fit one of a half my own size in a shirt I buy (that is my size).

Traffic and lines are really the big bummers here and I guess so is the price model on mobile plans and availability of cell phone models and features. Paying money for receiving calls is odd to this European guy and paying for receiving SMS is very strange, especially when you have no control over accepting or rejecting it, but nevertheless you have to pay.

The mandatory sir and ma’am is starting to bother me a little by now but hopefully I will be able to get over soon. Generally speaking though, I love Seattle so far, we have excellent weather, people are very friendly and diverse, the city is so green and clean and being close to water if of course added value.

All in all though, life is good and I am enjoying it. I look very much forward to the wedding and the months ahead as it will be filled with many changes and changes are good.

For now, This is me, reporting for .farshid sedghi. blog, wishing you all there a wonderful day.