I went to "Colorfest" with Tammy and a bunch of ladies on Saturday.  It was in a country town near a mountain range (or large hills according to John) close to Virginia.  I was told it was close to Camp David, the President's country retreat.  The Maryland countryside is beautiful with hills, trees, and the occasional thoroughbred farm.  At Colorfest, it was super relaxing to just walk around and look at art and such.  It was even more relaxing when one of the ladies bought something from a wood carver and he gave us white sangria from a Maryland vineyard.  I love sangria.  

 A Japanese Maple.  They are cute and turn red.  I want one of these when I get a house...someday.  

 Tammy.  

 A miniature hay baler.  

 A pansy.  Apparently they are hardier than their name suggests because you can dust snow off of them and they will still be flowering.  

 I went to Tammy's on Sunday to watch the Ravens and Redskins football games, although I spent most of my time eating shrimp and various other tidbits and drinking raspberry wine mixed with Chardonnay.  

 Tammy gave me a freshly steamed Maryland crab with Old Bay sprinkled on it.  

 The guys not only told me how to eat them, but how to catch them.  One also mentioned that they are scavengers and might have just eaten a dead guy at the bottom of the bay in Baltimore--how lovely.

We got a 30 inch pizza for dinner.  I've never seen one so big.  Tammy's husband said that people were gawking when he walked out of the cafe with it.  

My externship is going great!  I've necropsied a little bit of everything, from macaques to endangered spotted turtles.  

 Yesterday, we all went to this place, which has been on the food network before, and I got their specialty--a crab cone.  It was amazing!  A lot of calories, but amazing.  It consisted of a waffle cone filled with fries and a crab cake with some sauce on top.  

Dawn.  

Last night, I went to trivia night with my colleagues at a local bar.  I really enjoyed it!  And it helped force me to adjust to American time.  I actually drank a classy beer for a change.  I'm such a lightweight though.  It took me all night to drink one long neck.  

Last night, one of my Mom's best friends took me out for dinner.  Pam, whom I had never met before was super pretty and a lot of fun too.  She took me to a place called Pazo.  I'm pretty sure it's the classiest restaurant that I've ever been in.  The owners are a couple that are chefs and own four restaurants in Baltimore.  They have been on national TV for their food and Pam told me that a couple of their other restaurants are really expensive.  I just thought, wow, they must be because this one has free valet parking and the priciest menu I've ever seen.  I got swordfish which was served rare and it was so good!  Pam got a dessert that came with sweet corn ice cream that really tasted like sweet corn.  It was different but we liked it!

I walked to Mass on Sunday morning.  Under the sky scrapers, many homeless were sleeping on the cement, some amidst the giant pillars of a beautiful building.  It reminded me of the ever growing gap between the rich and poor in our country and the stark contrast between their lives.  

Mass was interesting.  There were five priests there, as this is the center of an archdiocese.  The readings were largely about marriage and the priest gave a wonderful homily.  He said that back in the 70's he would tell people in marriage prep that 75% of Catholics never get divorced while this number is close to 50% in the general US population.  Unfortunately, people have changed and today the number for Catholics borders closely with that of the general population.  He mentioned John Paul II's Theology of the Body and possibly unknowingly implied one reason why many people have changed by highlighting Jesus' quote about letting the children come to Him.  Then again, maybe he knew exactly what he implied.  

After mass, my Mom's friend, Tammy, picked me up to see Baltimore with some of her in-laws.  She showed us the little communities centered on different immigrant cultures and took us to the 30-somethingith floor of the Transamerica building where she works.  

 The harbor

 The stadiums of the Orioles and Ravens.  

 Fort McHenry where they flew the flag that Francis Scott Key wrote the "Star-Spangled Banner" about.  

 Tammy and her cousin-in-law, Lauren

 The Key Bridge, which is about where Key was when he wrote the poem.  

 Micheal Jackson made with pop-cans.  

 Ducks and a jelly fish.  

 The "Power Plant" Barnes and Noble, which originally was a power plant.  

 A fun pirate ship.  

 Today, I'm at Johns Hopkins and I've moved into a nice apartment down the street.  The people are nice here and I love it.  My desk has a pretty view of Baltimore.  They do a lot of research here, especially on HIV.  In fact, the office I'm in is right next to a retrovirus lab.  They get all kinds of lab animals here.  Yesterday, we necropsied a macaque in the BL3 room.  They also have an excellent combined residency and PhD program here, although the residency has only a year of intense, largely self-driven study.  And here's a fun fact for you--they do face transplants on pigs here.  Frankenstein style, they literally take the face off of one pig, bone, cartilage and all, and use hardware to plate it on another.  Eventually, they will hopefully be able to do this for people that have been in car accidents and such.  

A woman from Italy sits at the desk next to mine and we were commiserating about jet lag.  I told her that I got up at 5:30 and that was progress for me.  I really like getting up early but 5 am is a little extreme.  

 The view from my apartment.  

I've come from England to New England.  It's 6 am and I'm awake...I kind of like getting up early though.  I'm in downtown Baltimore and this is the view of the inner harbor from my massive hotel room.  My mom got me this room for pretty cheap--she must have worked her secretarial magic somehow.  

 These are memorials to George Washington and La Fayette (a Revolutionary War general).  

 A hibiscus.  

 A mural by the Basilica of the Assumption.  

 St. Alphonsus.  

 I saw a couple of just married couples--I always snap their picture and hope they don't notice b/c I think they're cute.  

This morning I got a surprise--the dog that I made my ground rounds presentation on didn't have Strep but E. coli.  We had a second case of hemorrhagic pneumonia that may have been Strep but I may also find myself out of luck and have to redo my presentation.  

One of the clin path residents asked me if I was going to come here for a residency.  I told her that I like it here very much and there's no reason why I couldn't but that I'll likely end up staying in the US (although their case-load is low here, I do love it).  She said that she was glad that she stayed in Europe because she has a little more vacation here and can even fly to Switzerland over a weekend to see her family.  I think that this resident is soo cool.  She is a beautiful blue-eyed, blond with straight-cut bangs and always dresses in a pretty, European fashion.  Today, she told me that she can speak Swiss-German, German, and French because her mom is French.  I am always astounded when I meet people that can speak that many languages.  And her English sounds more American than British because she watches American TV shows.  Too funny.  

My week is going quite swimmingly. Yesterday, after passing by one of the world’s best veterinary neuropathologists in the hall (whom most certainly didn’t recognize me), I stepped outside into simultaneous sunshine and rain and witnessed another spectacular rainbow.

Today, my Japanese friend told me her grad school work is on white rhinos—how neat. Apparently the females have repro problems in captivity. I can’t remember my Japanese friend’s name or my British friend’s name either because hers is Welsh. I feel slightly bad but half the time I don’t remember common names, let alone unusual, foreign ones. My British friend is a vet tech student. I helped her learn about diabetes mellitus and insipidus on Sunday because she had to write an essay on the pathophysiology of the two over the weekend. It made me remember taking physiology my first semester in vet school. It seems like that was such a long time ago! It’s crazy; I take boards in just a couple of months!!