"The code was a quote on Armed Forces Radio: the comment that the temperature is rising, followed by eight bars of White Christmas"

Never come to asia without an exit strategy. Mine is Korea Air Flight 14-something to Seoul. If all goes well it will carry my 4 hours to South Korea where I will catch an even larger bird to Washington Dulles. Amazingly, and there are those who will say I am a liar, the flight only takes 50 minutes from Seoul to DC. I take off at 10:00am and arrive at 10:50am on the same day. The only reasonable explanation is that Korea is actually located somewhere in the vicinity of New Jersey...


During the 30 minute bus ride to the airport I was beginning to digest the experiences of this trip. I scrubbed in on my first case,
put in my first few stitches, saw a toe become a finger, a rib become an ear, ate a cobra, and met a guy who can claim 1/2000th of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. I discovered that I really enjoy working with children, especially when you get to put them to sleep if they start crying. I ate more beautiful soup in 10 days than I have in the past 10 years, the same goes for quail eggs, chicken feet, snails, river crab, cuttle fish, octopus, and snake penis vodka, and ant larva liquor. I ate the best croissants I've ever tasted, and drank dozens of tiny opaque black coffees with condensed milk. I expanded my Vietnamese vocabulary from 0 to about 15 words. i can say hello/goodbye, thank you, chicken, beef, good, bad, one, doctor, soup.... ok maybe that's 10 words but not bad for a tonal language. Probably most importantly, I have a renewed sense for why I am in medical school. I think this journey has created enough momentum to get me through the rest of the, what has been frankly boring, first year.

Projects on the Vermont horizon:

more beer classes (Belgians coming up), bottling my California red ale, a Schweitzer fellowship involving bread baking, some research, some sculpting, some more exams and then the last summer vacation i will have until i retire.