two thousand nine, you were mighty fine

Though I haven't made an end-of-the-year post in years, I thought 2009 deserved one. It was a really special year full of highs and lows.

2009 High #1: Medical School
Well, I finally made it. I was so ready for medical school by the end of my 3 years of undergrad and now that I'm here it's fantastic (though there are some things about undergrad that I do miss terribly, namely reading and discussing literature). So far it's been incredibly inspiring and refreshing. I really enjoy the people in my class, and the second-years that I've befriended have been such sweethearts. Everyone around me is bright and teeming with this desire to learn and become good doctors that I'm constantly taken aback by their energy. Moreover, my classmates are professional, smart, and most surprisingly of all, very funny! They crack me up all the time. My classes have been going well, and something I've been exceptionally impressed with is the faculty. FINALLY, no more of this never-talk-to-your-science-professor shit from undergrad (c'mon, you mean to tell me you actually had a relationship with your cell bio professor?). The faculty here are really kind and approachable, even being scientists :)

2009 Low #1: Medical School
No kidding when they say that med school is tough. I'm currently recovering from the first half of our neuroscience block, and you wouldn't believe how many times throughout the semester that I've asked myself, "What did I get myself into?" (Hint, it was before every anatomy exam and while studying for HBM.) It's also true that med school isn't for everyone. After going through the first semester, I realize now that it takes just the right combination of smarts, masochism, and untempered and pure fall-over-yourself earnestness, with a dash of obsessive compulsive behavior. I thought I was OCD until I got to medical school and met some of my classmates. My classmates are always ahead, always striving, and always on top of things. It really opened my eyes to just how hard-working people can be, and the truth that I'll probably never be "the best" because there's always going to be someone more anal or someone who just wants it more than me. It's extremely humbling and a good lesson to be learned, I think.

2009 High #2: Australia and New Zealand
Incredible. I had so many once in a lifetime experiences: skydiving, scuba diving on the Great Barrier Reef, white water rafting, rappelling down a 100-foot waterfall in the Blue Mountains, seeing my first Broadway musical, and living in one of the most beautiful, breathtaking cities in the world…Sydney. I interned at a food and travel magazine (so perfectly blissfully random), went to magazine photoshoots, escaped to the beach whenever I pleased, hauled myself to Sydney's most frenetic clubs, and once found myself vomiting pathetically into an Australian McDonald's bathroom toilet (ok, so that was a low).

2009 Low #2: Being away from friends and family
I missed my friends and family immensely when I was away for 5 months. Were it not for the miracles of videochat and cheap international calling cards, I don't know where I would have been! Of course, it didn't help my homesickness that I had The Roommate From Hell for the first four weeks, but luckily that was resolved and my second living situation was so much better with a roommate who was both adorable and funny. (The first roommate was put into a room with someone who was not so welcoming, and I can't say that I felt sorry for her.)

2009 High #3: Reunion with Andrei in the fall
Being apart from Andrei was hard while I was in Australia, New Zealand, and then China. Sometimes I would feel a physical ache being away from him, and every minute we've been together since has been even sweeter. As someone who once firmly rejected long distance relationships, I suddenly find myself thinking it could work with the right person. Which leads me to another low…

2009 Low #3: The looming future
The prospect of not being in the same city as Andrei and all my friends next year is daunting. It's frustrating that I'm firmly set in one place, but I'm not sure where Andrei or my undergrad friends will end up. Or my high school friends, for that matter. It's an unknown, and I hate the unknown.

2009 High #4: Scrubbing into my first surgery
Over the summer I scrubbed into my first surgery, a kidney transplant from a father to son. To see a white lifeless kidney that was detached from a healthy body turn rosy, healthy pink once put into a sick body… wow. Medicine is awesome---literally full of awe.

2009 High #5 (Okay, so there are more highs in this list than lows, and this is another one involving Andrei): our two-year anniversary in NYC
It was an incredibly romantic weekend, and perfect in almost all respects. Having once hated NYC, I have to say that this trip changed my mind and made me almost love NYC. Of course, still would never live there though. Boston is definitely more my type of city.

And to wrap up:

favorite video of the year
not a music video, but my favorite youtube video of the year: http://bit.ly/498Cbe

favorite song of the year
My Will is Good, Port O'Brien

favorite artist of the year
Thao with the Get Down Stay Down

favorite movie of the year
Up, no question about it. Pixar movies will always have a place in my heart.

favorite book of the year
A toss up between Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything (finally, a book that makes science fun!) and Stieg Larsson's first two books of the Millennium trilogy, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire (can't help loving adventure/thriller/mystery fiction with good writing for once!!)


Well that's it for 2009. I'm both excited and scared for what the new decade will bring… and where I'll be in another ten years.

uluru part two

Day Two --- KINGS CANYON

We were picked up ridiculously early by our tour guide, Dan, who drove the five of us and about ten others to the middle of the Outback. The first day we visited Kings Canyon, which was created thousands of years ago from a tiny crack in the rock that eventually became the canyon it is today. The visit to Kings Canyon was blisteringly hot and bright. You won't understand until you've experienced it, but the Outback sun is terrifying. I wouldn't want to be exposed to the Outback sun for more than a few hours, and I can understand now why all the animals in the Outback only come out at night.

Today's Predicted Temperature Range... It was HOTT with two T's.

After a few hours at Kings Canyon and a near-heat-exhaustion experience for me, we hopped back on to the van and kept driving through the Outback desert. For miles upon miles there was absolutely nothing out the window except red desert and short, scraggly shrubs growing by the edge of the road. It was an altogether deserted and alien place--like stepping foot onto a Mars that just happened to have a bit of vegetation. Surreal.

A few hours away from Kings Canyon we FINALLY saw Uluru:

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Just kidding! That's not Uluru---it's FOOL-uru! Commonly mistaken for Uluru, FOOL-uru (aka Mt Connor) is actually a mountain, not a monolith like Uluru (don't ask me the difference--I still don't quite understand. As far as I can understand, Uluru is one giant chunk of pure rock, whereas mountains are made up of dirt, rock, and other organic matter.)
ANYWAY, so FOOL-uru. Not Uluru. FOOL-uru. (This pun made laugh for perhaps five minutes straight, and then chuckle until we arrived at our campsite. HEY--when you're in the middle of nowhere with nothing to entertain you but lots of red dirt and your dying ipod, you would get a kick out of FOOL-uru, too.)

After another few hours of driving we arrived at our campsite.

Proudly holding up one of my firewood contributions.

The campsite was literally in the middle of nowhere--no electricity or running water or sign of civilization nearby. We had twenty minutes to gather as much firewood as we could before the sun set and we lost our light, hence the picture above.

But you're probably also wondering about the net that I'm wearing over my face. Wait--did I fail to mention this to you earlier?? Oh yes, right. So there are MILLIONS of flies in the Outback. Buzzing, whizzing, germy, great big black flies that stick to your body and land on your shirt to suck the sweat off of your profusely sweating body because there are no other sources of moisture available. There are no lakes, streams, creeks--NO water, ANYWHERE. (There was water when we were there, but more on that later.) So the flies take to human visitors, attempting every two seconds to dart into our open mouths. As Dan, our tour guide, explained, there is so little shade in the Outback that the flies get excited by the prospects of spending a few seconds in someone's mouth--JUST TO GET OUT OF THE SUN. THIS PLACE IS INSANE, I TELL YA!

Our insanely beautiful campfire.

The Outback at Night (currently my desktop background!)

That night we all ate delicious stew out of a big communal pot and slept under the stars in "swags," which are big heavy-duty canvas sleeping bags that you can fit a thin mattress and sleeping bag into. We looked like a couple of sacks of potatoes lying on the ground. Lying in our swags, we looked up at the millions of stars in the sky and debated whether there were more stars in the universe or more grains of sand on Earth. The stars were all crystal clear and perfectly luminous. It made me miss the days of the old (i.e. hundreds of years ago) when man could still camp out and see the stars from anywhere on Earth. As we fell asleep we watched shooting stars dart across the sky. One piece of advice our tour guide Dan gave us: If you do see a shooting star, don't call out because by the time you do, the shooting star will have disappeared and your friends will be pissed! And so under the stars we slept.

....And here's when the story gets really really GOOD...
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A few hours later (how long, I'm not sure since I had no light available)...

I suddenly wake up feeling like there are thousands of tiny pricks of fire and ice on my skin. I literally feel like my entire body is being licked by tiny, individual flames, and it HURTS like a mother!!! Lying in my swag I am thinking I have gone CRAZY--what else could explain why I was feeling like millions of bugs were crawling on me when everyone else around me was sleeping soundly in their swags?

I jump up out of my sleeping bag and swag and run over to the van, where there are some flashlights. I am wearing only soffe shorts and a thin cami. I grab a flashlight, turn it on, and shine it on my body (probably waking up two or three people in the process). And what do I see? I see a bunch of tiny little ant-like bugs crawling all over me. They're small and black and rapidly scrambling all over my body. Now, unlike some, I am NOT a girl to be freaked out by bugs, so my first reaction was to think that I was just being INSANE or half-asleep for thinking that these little harmless-looking ant-like bugs could be causing me so much pain. It literally felt like my skin was being assaulted by tiny darts. It couldn't POSSIBLY be the bugs. So what do I do? I brush off the bugs I can see and I go back to my swag to try to get back to sleep.

Literally THIRTY SECONDS later I am back to standing up over my swag and freaking out. The crawling/itching/pinching feeling hasn't stopped and it's more tortuous than ever. I dash over to where our guide Dan is sleeping and I wake him up gestapo-style with a flashlight in his face.

"Dan... I think there are some, like, bugs or something that are crawling all over me..."
He turns over, and without even looking at the bugs on me, he goes, "Oh yeah, that'd be the termites."

.... the TERMITES? There is no fucking wood out here in the Outback!!!

"Uh Dan, termites?"
"Yeah, they probably think you're wood and they'll just take a bite out of you to check." He chuckles. ...HE CHUCKLES.

"Uh... okay HOW DO I MAKE IT STOP?"
"Move your swag a few meters away and spray some of this bug spray around your swag."

I do move my swag and within ten minutes I feel the crawling painful pricks on my skin subside. I have obviously moved out of the prime termite territory. I toss and turn and try to go back to sleep. It's hard because the feeling of all those termites biting at me is a sensation I can't forget easily--even writing this today, nearly 6 weeks later, I still feel the sharpness of that CRAZY pain. It's an unimaginable sensation that I would wish only upon my worst enemies.

I try going back to sleep, but at this point it is hardly worthwhile. We have to up in two hours anyway. I am just drifting off into sleep when suddenly I see my friend Lisa a few meters away standing up over her swag, performing the exact same stunned dance that I was doing earlier. She is brushing her arms and legs, stamping around her swag, and looking around in disbelief. She has got termites.

As a wizened expert in termite matters, I matter-of-factly tell her that they are termites and nothing to be worried about. She looks at me like I am out of my fucking MIND. Like me, she can't comprehend how tiny termites can be causing her so much pain. I tell her to move her swag, and she moves closer to me and away from prime termite territory. We both try to sleep some more.

Less than two hours later at around 4AM we are woken up by Dan. We need to get packed and have breakfast and start the day before the Outback's lethal sun rises and makes the heat unbearable.

I move back over to my pile of stuff that I left in the middle of the night and see two of my other friends still huddled in their sleeping bags. Turns out that they ALSO felt the termites, but not knowing what to do, they just scrunched up tighter in their sleeping bags, hoping that the termites wouldn't get in. Of course, the termites DID get in, and the two girls spent the entire night sweltering within their sleeping bags and trapped in a confined space with a bunch of termites.

Turns out the rest of our camp also experienced the termites, and most people didn't understand what was going on. The didn't understand that they were being devoured by these tiny menacing bugs. Everyone else but me and Lisa just tried to sleep through it (meaning that most of our camp got no sleep that night).

Also turns out that the termites were out in so many numbers that night because they felt a huge storm coming on that day. Termites can somehow sense when a big rainstorm is going to occur, so they were out to reinforce their nests or whatever it is that termites live in.

And turns out the termites were right. That morning we had a monstrous amount of rainfall that drenched us to the very bone while we were climbing across Kata Tjuta.

But that's a story for next time.

END DAY TWO.

jk, this post is not on Uluru (aw shucks)

Sigh. I started writing up the post for my Outback experience... and then realized that it's not just a 30 min. endeavor but more like a 2 hr odyssey to go back and recapture each detail. It's going to take me more than just this bit of time sitting in my Australian lit class and not paying attention (sidenote: when I decided to take a "vacation" to Australia for the semester, my work ethic went on permanent vacation, too).

Instead, despite this being a WEE bit out of order, I'll share with you my 20th birthday celebration. Andrei was here the week of my birthday, and I had all my friends around me and it was really all a girl could ask for:

The night of my birthday I had class 6-8PM, but afterwards we headed off to Newtown (which I think I've written about previously) to go to a restaurant that Andrei had checked out earlier that week, called UrbanBites. I think it's important to note here that Andrei and my friends were entirely responsible for making this a memorable night for me. Andrei truly went above and beyond by planning out the entire evening perfectly: dinner, gifts, cake, and figuring everything out to make it all work! My friends went all out, too (as you'll see in the following pictures).

Also, this is the first time I've attempted to upload a video on blogger, so cross your fingers it works. The part when things go sideways is when Rachel oh-so-gracefully almost drops the camera.

A normal picture of us at dinner....

...followed by a SWEET asian-ified picture of us (also because they tease me for doing this way too often... perhaps they don't understand that it's facetious???)

This is the cake that my friends baked for me in UniLodge's ghetto ovens. I don't think the people at home can understand how touching this is until you've moved to UniLodge and gone to one of their kitchens (it is NOT conducive to cooking). They added Oreos along the side because they all noticed (and very observantly so) that I like carrying around Oreos with me as a snack on long trips. :D I feel like these girls from me backwards and forwards! Special thanks to Becky and Jane! (Also note the v. cute Happy Birthday Beanie Baby knockoff in the back, courtesy of them as well.)

The after-dinner party in the lounge. They had BALLOONS and everything; it was glorious. A short side note to explain the ballooons. It was about 11PM when we had finished eating at UrbanBites and it had been raining all night. I'm in a dress and heels and so me, Andrei, Kelly, Marie and I take a cab back to UniLodge. The other 5 walk back, insisting that they'll be fine. Turns out they chose to walk back because they needed time to blow up the balloons. So imagine that you're just minding your business in Newtown at 11PM at night, and suddenly these 5 girls come running at you... brandishing.... BALLOONS. Which they are blowing up mid-run. And it's pouring outside. I'm told it was a very funny scene.

And finally, all 8 of us together (Andrei is taking the photo) :) It brings a tear to my eye.

Anyway, I hope you all enjoyed the video, as low res as it is--and as usual I look like a total idiot as everyone around me is acting supremely nice. (PS the video took a humongously long time to upload and I probably blew off all of BUSC's internet capabilities just to upload this one measly 32 second video...)