Schemas to Search_path

I was playing around with schemas today to understand how it would fit
in our application design. I couldn't understand why I got to set
search_path to schema name everytime I login to psql.

This is what I did.

-ceated a user "foo" with createdb privilege as psql -d template1
-created db "foodb" with encoding = unicode as psql -d template1 -U foo
-- this makes foo as the owner of the db.
-create schema "foo_schema" with authorization to foo user as psql -d
foodb -U foo
-dropped public schema as I don't want others or foo user to create
objects in public schema. I did this via psql -d foodb -U postgres --
since postgres being the owner of public schema I had to login as
superuser postgres.

Now comes the fun part

I logged into foodb as foo user and tried to create a table. Bang!
ERROR: no schema has been selected to create in. search_path had $user,
public the default ones, shouldn't the table get created in user's
authorized schema. Perhaps, I'm trying to compare with oracle
users/schemas.

However, when set search path to foo_schema then table gets created
fine. Also, whenever I login, how should make \dt to just show the
objects under the user's authorized schema without setting search path
everytime.

Thanks
Stalin