Travel Tales

Baltimore skyline

I have been back on the East Coast (aka "the Right Coast", as per general surgery preceptor Dr. Dave) for two weeks, enjoying the milder weather and greater opportunity for rad nibbles and sips compared to Lansing.

Baltimore is quite all right. It's not an intuitive town to know, as all the routes are prone to twists and turns. The leaves are still changing, so it can be quite beautiful to suddenly find one's self in a wooded and twisty section of road while driving between the house and Target. The overwhelming majority of buildings seem to be made either of brick or of stone, and many people live in either row-houses or duplex style houses. I love all the history. Everywhere you go something important happened forever ago. I am still seeking Edgar Allen Poe's house and tomb.

Made a pilgrimage to the famed Ace of Cakes location!

I'm starting to question my housing arrangement here. I am renting a room from a woman I found on Craigslist. It's a well kept duplex style home in a quiet neighborhood. I really have the place to myself because she is never here. I don't know where she is or what she's off doing, but this place is always empty. She has a lot of furniture. Like, A LOT. But her kitchen, though affixed with high end appliances and multiple sets of formal china, lacks the basics: knives, tupperware, cutting boards, a can opener and even a normal fridge. This fridge is the size of the one I had in my college dorm, and rather than refrigerate anything, it skips right to freezing it. I have new sheets and a pillow provided, but no comforter. There is a brand new washing machine here, which doesn't work, and no dryer at all. Ergo, I'm learning what it's like to camp out at the laundromat every week. Suck. There's a flat panel TV in my room, but it only gets one channel (so what's the point?). So...methinks that for $750 rent for the month, I *might* be getting ripped off.

The hospital at which I'm working is nice and newly remodeled. It has delivery robots. These things look like square R2D2's and they cruise the entirety of the hospital making medicine deliveries. Totally freaks me out. At first I thought someone on the floor must be driving it with a remote control. Nope. It does it all by itself. I also began to appreciate the magnitude of the Jewish population over here, when I realized that the hospital has two cafeterias: one regular and one kosher. And they're both maximally full at lunch time. Not something you tend to see out West.

Ground floor atrium at Sinai Hospital

Experience the med-bot for yourself (sorry I shot it vertical; I was scared):

Interview season has begun, and I must say that I am disappointed that all the interviews seem to be landing between October 26 and December 14. There are only a discrete number of days available to interview in that time, and at this point I have been forced to forfeit two interview offers because I am already booked on a given day--and no one except me seems particularly interested in interview date flexibility. I am two interviews down, have two this week and another next week, which will put me at half done.

But I enjoy the Right Coast. I feel like I fit in here. I could be here for four years. I enjoy the proximity to other cool stuff: 30 min to DC. 2h to Philly. 3 1/2 h to NYC. 6h to Boston. And DIRECT flights to the Caribbean! Yeah. I could live here.

Made it through Hurricane Sandy. Quite glad I wasn't on the NJ or the NY coast, and where I was in Eastern Pennsylvania wasn't even quite as a bad as the storms that flooded Centralia a few years back. I ended up stuck an extra night in York, PA, where I was interviewing while the storm was coming ashore. I had a moment while braving the elements across the hotel parking lot to Ruby Tuesday for dinner where I thought I'm in a hurricane right now. Well this hasn't happened before.