US visit recap

Well, all good things must come to an end. As fun as it was to wear my fancy suit and heels and to drag my suitcase across southern New England for a month, I am now back in London with Danny and I'm learning all about English Christmas and winter-weather preparedness (or lack thereof). More about the winter in England later, but for now I just wanted to recap my trip to the US.

First of all, a HUGE thank-you to everyone I stayed with over the month, and everyone who drove me around to interviews, dinners, train stations, etc. This includes: Mom, Dad, Jon and Julia, Miya and Lester, Erica, and Marlise. An especially big thank you to my mom, who hasn't chauffeured me that much since I was 16. Thanks, Mommy!

There was also some good eating and catching up with a bunch of other people: it was really great to see all of you, and my apologies to those of you I didn't see enough, or didn't get to see at all. Sorry to people I said I would call and didn't get to - my bad :(

Minor exciting announcement is that our ultimate frisbee tournament was a success - the Happy Hannukah Huckers won their bracket, beating out, um, Lincoln-Sudbury high school for an amazing light-up santa sleigh trophy! Good times. Totally worth the bloody -> dying toenails I am now enduring (though thankfully, painlessly).

More exciting than that was Medicine Lake's EP release concert, which was an incredible show. Medicine Lake is the band my brother is in - as the sax player and occasional (though on some songs not so occasional!) vocalist. Here are some pics of him doing his thing:



In the case of music, though, if a picture is worth 1000 words, then an mp3 is worth a million. You should listen to their stuff here. You can also see them on Youtube, here. Like what you hear? If you want to buy the album you can do it on itunes or from cdbaby. Or you can get in touch with my brother directly (cheapest way to buy the album!) Want more shameless plugging? Also check out Danny's brother's band, The Real Feel, which is also awesome.


Lastly, I just thought I should recap the business-reason for going back to Boston: my interviews. The good news is that I liked all the programs and really think they would all be excellent places for me to train. Everything has something unique that they offer, and each one fits my interests in a slightly different way. Now I just have to weigh all those individual factors and decide which are the most important. Here is the basic philosophy of the places I interviewed, in the order I went to them:

Brown: "Our mission is to take care of the state of Rhode Island, particularly the uninsured population."

Cambridge: "Our mission is to take care of the city of Cambridge, and to embrace our patient population for all of its complexity."

Boston Medical Center (BU): "Our mission is to take care of the underserved population in Boston and to provide trainees with skills in the outpatient setting."

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center: "Our mission is to always provide the best possible clinical care, while constantly working on quality improvement."

UMass Medical Center: "Our mission is to create a healthy learning environment so our residents get the best possible training experience."

Brigham and Women's: "We think we offer the best training program in the country. And despite being a cutting-edge, tertiary care center, we also love primary care!"

Well, there you have it. Obviously there's much more to the programs than that, but that was my impression of the main message they were all trying to get across. Lots to think about in the upcoming 6 weeks are so, maybe I'll post some of my thoughts here, but don't expect to find out my rank order...some things are better left unpublicized :)

Next up, a recap of our trip to beautiful, snowy Edinburgh!

Bank Holiday Weekend

Finally took a photo of a Vegetarian Full English Breakfast. The lighting is weird because we were eating outside!



Last weekend (August 28-30th) was a bank holiday weekend. Why? Because, as my boss put it, "In the UK we actually get holidays, though not nearly as many as Continental Europe." In addition to the expected public holidays (Easter, Christmas, New Years Day, and the Queens Diamond Jubilee to be held in 2012), there are three Bank Holiday Mondays - two of which are inexplicably held in May (Early May Bank Holiday and Spring Bank Holiday), and one on the last weekend in August. How to celebrate? It was too late to make reservations to take a true vacation, since most of England plans a weekend getaway, but we did take a day trip out of London to the New Forest National Park.

The New Forest is a good example of the difference between natural beauty in the US vs. UK. While some parts of Northern England and Scotland and North Wales are impressive, much of English beauty is more...subtle. The New Forest would never be a National Park in the US. It is mostly open grass pastures with grazing cows, horses and ponies, interspersed with pretty forests and small towns with thatched roofs. But the great thing about the New Forest is the cycling trails - many miles of cycle-only trails, and plenty of pubs and tea rooms to keep cyclists refreshed. Just an hour and half train ride from London, it's the perfect day trip! You just have to be careful, because there are often ponies on the road, on the cycle trail, and just outside the pubs...









Sunday was unimpressive in terms of what we did, although we did check out a new farmers market, which is always exciting. On Monday we ventured down to the famous Notting Hill Carnival, which is held every August Bank Holiday. Apparently it's the "largest street festival in Europe", and I'd believe it. It's an impressive West Indian cultural festival, with a parade and some of the most spectacular costumes I've ever seen. It's also an impressive display of young Londoners' eagerness to get drunk in the middle of the day (you could buy shots at tables set up on the sidewalk), and their ability to tolerate huge crushes of people. We left relatively early to go play ultimate with Curve - we hadn't been in over a month! Then we came home and made Shakshuka. All in all a great weekend!

A birthday in London

Yesterday, as many of you noted with kind messages, was my birthday.  My 28th, a fact you may want to keep in mind for a brief story at the end of this blog post.  As birthdays go, this was a pretty fantastic one: good food, new friends, and more exploration of what London has to offer.

After sleeping in (helped by the fact that the bedroom in our basement is the most underground bit of the whole place, with only a bit of natural light streaming through a small window), Becca made me breakfast, constructed almost completely from this week's haul from the farmers' market.  Scrambled ggs with red onions and cheddar, with a hearty slice of a London Bloomer with tomato, basil, and buffalo mozzarella.  Ten days in, Becca has mastered the art of cooking eggs on a gas stove.

Next we took the Northern Line to Charing Cross for a short jaunt across the City.  We stopped briefly in Trafalgar Square, hopefully for the one and only time this year (except to look out on it from the National Gallery).  The things that seem like perfect destinations as a 17-year-old tourist have a tendency to get rather stale after a decade, I suppose.  Still, Trafagar Square provided a remarkable contrast to the City on a Sunday: the first full of people and general chaos, the second practically devoid of all human activity (the City is London's financial district; with just 8,000 inhabitants, things get awfully quiet when the banks close - think La Défense in Paris).  By the time we reached Fleet Street after following the Strand, we practically had the place to ourselves.

But before that, our first church in London: St Clement Danes.  Designed by Christopher Wren in the late 17th century, it suffered heavy bombing in the Second World War and is now the central church of the Royal Air Force.  Most of the paraphernalia in the church relates to its current function: memorial plaques, flags of RAF units, and the like.  I was struck by its rather wide central aisle and its rather peculiar position in the middle of the Strand.  I suspect that the more time I walking around the mess of streets that is the City, the less striking things like this will be.

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St Clement also claims to be the St. Clement's mentioned in the famous first line of the English nursery rhyme "Oranges and Lemons", though this claim is hotly contested by St Clement Eastcheap.  St Clement Danes does have this plaque... so I'll leave it for you to decide.

Next it was up Ludgate Hill to St Paul's, all the while dittying "Feed the Birds".  I was intrigued by St Martin, Ludgate (another Wren church), but it's now the home of a Chinese congregation on Sundays, so it was closed to the public.

Tons to be said about St Paul's, of course, but we only stopped in for a few minutes on this trip, so I'll save the full report for a later time.  Instead, I'll try to amuse you with signs we saw walking from St Paul's to the Bank tube stop.

I'm a sucker for puns.  Especially when they involve hummus.

That's a street sign, folks.  Not "Poultry Lane" or "Poultry Road."  Just "Poultry."

A double whammy!  A funny-sounding name on one sign, and an obscure, archaic trade on the other.

After a short stop back in Dartmouth Park, we found our way over to Clissold Park in Stoke Newington to try to track down Curve for a bit of birthday ultimate frisbee.  Another warm, sunny Sunday, another London park full of people.  I haven't decided whether it's because Londoners love their parks so much or because they've been trained to soak in every last ray of sunshine in the summer.

We were just looking for some friendly pick-up, but it turns out that Curve had a match scheduled, so we got a full game in our very first appearance.  Good value.  The other team was a friendly bunch of high schoolers who had been playing together since last summer but had never played a competitive match before.  So it was a relaxed, low-key game with a teaching atmosphere.  The fact that a group of 16- and 17-year-olds from Ilford successfully arranged a game with an adult ultimate team illustrates one of the more endearing elements of English sports culture, its essential amateurish-ness.  I don't mean this in a pejorative way (though one does wonder why it's been almost 75 years since a British man won Wimbledon).  Rather, what I find so great is the idea that, on any given day, two teams, regardless of their standard of play, can get together for a game in a park.  Obviously this has its limits, but the prevalence of giant-killing in the FA Cup shows this happens even at the professional level.  You occasionally see major league baseball teams play their minor league affiliates or or university teams in exhibition games, but never in a competitive setting.  The amateurish nature of English sports promotes a rather friendly atmosphere around matches, especially at the lower standards.  In fact, I'm sure we would have gone to the pub with the other team, if not for the fact that the majority of them appeared to be 16 years old.

Not that appearances are always convincing.  Remember that bit above where I mentioned that yesterday was my 28th birthday?  Apparently I don't look it, at least to 16-year-olds.  Having heard my American accent, one of them asked me, "So, are you here on a gap year?"

That's right.  After eight years of post-secondary education and gray hairs that seem to be multiplying by the week, I apparently can still pass for 18 years old.  So here's a question for you, readers: is this a good thing or not?

After a drink at the pub with the friendly folks of Curve, it was back home, but not before a brief stop at the Happening Bagel in Finsbury Park.  It's no Kupel's, but still pretty tasty and left me picking poppy seeds out of my teeth.

Not bad for a day when we got out of bed at 10:30 in the morning.

Parks of London #1: Waterlow Park

First, a photo of my breakfast this morning:

All from the farmers market! I haven't seen cherries at the markets I've been to in New England, so this was pretty exciting. This was also my first time trying homemade, organic yog(h)urt (ingredients: cow's milk, probiotic cultures). It tasted kind of like...cheese. By which I mean, it was delicious.
Anyway, back to yesterday's London adventure, which was a visit to Waterlow park, a lovely park between us and our very posh neighbor to the North, Highgate. Waterlow park has everything a great urban park should have: bodies of water for waterfowl and other wildlife, organized sporting areas (in this case, tennis courts) as well as open fields for football kicking and disc throwing, well-manicured flower gardens as well as untended wildflowers, sunny knolls for reading and relaxing as well as shady wooded groves for the paler of us, and an abundance of walking paths to hold it all together. Waterlow park is also home to a small cafe and the Lauderdale house, which hosts jazz concerts, plays and art galleries. In other words, it has just enough to bring all members of a community out to enjoy a beautiful English weekend. We saw lots of families with young children (including what looked like a girls youth soccer team and their coaches having a 3-legged race), as well as old friends meeting for a cup of coffee. As I said, it was lovely.

We were there to people-watch and to remember how to throw and catch the disc, but I was immediately charmed by the rather large population of waterfowl. Thank goodness Danny got me the RSPB Guide to British Birds (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds). We were able to come home and identify all the ones I didn't know already.

This is a male tufted duck (note the tuft in the back of the head), apparently the commonest diving duck in Britain. It was, in fact, a very good diver. There were several families of tufted ducks on the various ponds of the park - the largest one had 9 ducklings! But as they were practicing their diving, it was very difficult to get all of them in a photo at once.

We also saw several families of Coots (right), which were the aggressors of the ponds. As confirmed by the bird guide, coots are very territorial, and they were constantly chasing off the other ducks on the pond. The chicks, however, were adorable and noisy.

And just for good measure, here's a picture of a juvenile Moorhen (below), one of Britain's more awkward-looking birds. Don't worry, I'm sure I'll post some pictures of the adults in the future.


Want more pictures of baby birds? Of course you do. Here's one of some mallards we saw in Montreal in June:
The ducklings proceeded to attempt to fly off the bridge, but since their wings were so small they just flapped helplessly and plopped into the pond below. It was quite endearing.

And lest you think we only care about waterfowl, here is probably the cutest thing we saw in the park all day:
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, in London, families play cricket in the park. I'll leave the heavy blogging about cricket to Danny (he's working on a doozy right now!), but let me just say that it is truly adorable to see five year olds have the patience and hand-eye coordination to play the refined, slow-to-progress game of cricket.



So in summary, Waterlow park is a great place to watch birds and people interact with their environment and their peers, a great place for the community to come together. We plan on returning for an outdoor performance of Othello, an evening bat-watching walk, and an afternoon of jazz in the garden. And of course we'll have to see how our little ducklings molt into their adult feathers!

The evening after this trip to the park we hosted our first house guest! David, who is now a world-famous musicologist, joined us at one of our local pubs to watch the world cup final. In the words of the woman shouting in the pub, vamos España!