I bought my tickets 4 days before the flight and packed my suitcases the night before departure. I spent the whole day in Moscow and a few hours at the London airport. We flew with British Airways (Moscow-London-Austin).

I hadn't slept properly for three days, but upon arriving in the USA, I didn't experience any jet lag. We just checked into a motel, found the strength to walk around the neighborhood in the evening, and fell asleep. From now on, I will sometimes write "we," as it turned out there were four of us "unfortunates" forced to go to Texas.

What we saw when we went out for a walk

Our gloomy room where we spent the first week

A view of typical America from our motel

An entry from my personal diary:

"June 13

Well, we are here. I can't even believe we survived all this and that a new piece of our life is finally beginning.

We arrived in Austin. We immediately realized that people here are truly different. They smile and are always ready to help. The first such person was a woman at the information desk. She helped us call a taxi, gave us a bunch of brochures, and wished us a good vacation. In return, we gave her a souvenir from Russia. Actually, the taxi driver was a rather suspicious character; we paid him 140 bucks for the ride (we drove for almost an hour, the distance was about 85 km; 120 for the ride + 20 for tips). In our "fancy" hotel, another Indian guy was waiting for us with bad news that we could have gotten there for 5 bucks by bus and that our restaurant, as it turns out, has almost no customers. But we were so tired that we preferred to retreat to our small and gloomy room. I hadn't slept properly for three days, I felt terrible, but we still decided to walk around the neighborhood to see where we were going to spend our summer. The plan to walk to Walmart failed, we returned home and went to sleep."

I kept a diary all summer. Every day I wrote down what interesting things happened, what we did, and what feelings filled me.

The first week flew by unnoticed. We lived 5 minutes from the restaurant where we worked, so we didn't really see the city. We only walked in the neighborhood, sunbathed by the nearest river, and walked to Walmart (almost an hour one way).

By the way, I bought a hat on the very first day. Am I in Texas or not, after all?

Nothing remarkable happened, we worked (I'll talk about work later), enjoyed our free time, but little by little we started to get bored. Everything changed exactly a week later when it was time to decide something about housing. But that's the next story.