A free weekend snatched from the scant few you get in surgery residency...Sharon and I decided to visit Eugenie in the City. Having packed the night previous, I fled the hospital Friday afternoon, and we were finally on our way that evening after the requisite midsummer's flight delays into New York. The fields of Idlewild embraced us with a blanket of warm heat and the rush of activity. Our cab pounded through BQE traffic and finally dropped us across the street at the Angelika theater. Alas, the picturesque carwash on Houston has been replaced by a huge, metallic Adidas store. Eugenie was working on a Photoshop rendering of a Home Depot for Westchester, and as soon as she found an appropriate stopping place we waded through the evening heat to the East Village and a Yakitori bar around St Marks.

The place was grooving to "No, it isn't straight Techno, it's Breakbeat" and plying its trade to edgy urban subculture youths with plenty of leisure time. I think about "leisure time" a lot now. As I walk down the street I think to myself, "well that fellow can stay out as late as he wants tonight, because he doesn't have to get up at 5 AM to round the service," or "she can wander the streets in her au courant bedroom slippers because there's no chance that her pager will go off and she'll have to dash to the hospital." Anyway, we ordered a Yakitori sampler with grilled chicken meat balls, scallions, beef...late at night, meat on a stick will always be a staple...with cold Sapporos too, of course. Sharon liked the chicken the best. The skewers not being enough, we ordered grilled Nigiri, Japanese rice balls filled with tuna. The next day, we took out pastries from Balthazar, and examined Eugenie and Ron's new office on Chrystie.

From there, on to the newly remodeled MoMA where we took in the permanent photo collection and a new exhibit of Friedlander's photography. We took a short respite from the city's hustle and bustle in the sculpture garden and then caught a subway back downtown. Walking from the 20's into the West Village, we looked for Balducci's, which, sadly, has disappeared.

That evening, it was Lupa, Mario Batali's more affordable eatery on Thompson. Justin joined us after a day at PS1. The wait was 2 hours and worth it. Sharon had ___________, I had the gnocchi, each a perfect pillowy sauce transport object, Nini had a wheatberry risotto, and Justin _______.

It's been a long time posting here. It's been a long year.

I'm retrospectively writing the remaining entries--oddly enough, I had less access here in the Lower 48 than I did in Europe or Hawaii!

Obviously, much of Savannah's tourist traffic has been drawn by the gravitational pull of "The Book", i.e. Midnight in the Garden of Good & Evil. This effect is only beginning to wear off now after its epic enlodgement in the New York Times Bestseller list. Surely if Clint Eastwood's film adaptation were as critically and popularly successful as Mystic River, we would have had to elbow out of the way some matron from Wisconsin for our bed & breakfast accomodations.

I think Savannah benefits from the presence of SCAD. It's students keep the town from feeling too staid, too complacent amidst its mossy genteel squares. Tidbits of conversations overheard at Gallery Espresso:

"I'm using Maya [a computer 3D rendering program] to render this scene in an airline graveyard"..."and his hands will be flamethrowers"..."every detail of the Royal Tennenbaums is just right. I especially like how Wes Anderson uses music"..."Have you seen Garden State yet? we're thinking about seeing it tonight. I think it's cool how he can be in a mainstream television show and make an independent movie like that"...And the conversations move rapidly between texturing scenes in a 3D animated movie, anime, a student's wicked stepmonster, and somebody's pet ferret.

Thus in our peregrinations about the town, the "edginess" of the SCAD students' artistic explorations, to their shabby chic East Village-type accomodations inject a liveliness--yes, sometimes immature, even sophomoric, but bracing--to the humid, magnolia-stately environment.

Our second day's walk took us again to River Street where Sharon had spied a Christmas Shop (it has come to my mild astonishment, that there are Christmas Shops everywhere at all times of the year!) where she found an ornament to appropriately commemorate our visit.

I don't know why she needed to smell the ornament though!

Some scenes along our walk:

By the way, the gamut of these JPEG image files washes much of the color out of them. The originals look much better. I promise.

Along our way, we explored the Colonial Cemetery. Its main entrance is marked by an arch erected by the Daughters of the American Revolution, and immediately within are the wafer-thin tombstones so common in old cemeteries in New England. The eastern brick wall of the cemetery is lined with headstones--presumably those that have fallen or displaced. The sky is overcast and we feel thin cold pinpricks of an occasional sprinkle. There's an occasional crepe myrtle with fuscia blossoms. Many long-dimmed lives from a harder era. Such-and-such killed in a duel. A child snuffed out after only 4 years.

That night, for dinner, we tried something different. Our guidebook noted that a Moroccan restaurant located on the main shopping street was both quite authentic and featured...bellydancers. Their review was enthusiastic and thus we set off for the "Casbah", which is housed in what used to be a storefront, it's windows mysteriously shrouded in drapery. Within, was a dark, crimson velveted space well populated with mostly families. In the name of authenticity, a pitcher of water was poured over our hands once we were seated in order to clean them for the forthcoming meal, since they were to be our only utensils. I started with a Cornish Hen Bastila, a tasty dish of cornish hen mixed with onions, parsley, spiced eggs and toasted almonds, wrapped in a philo dough pastry, baked and garnished with cinnamon and powdered sugar. One thing I will say about eating with your hands is that Moroccans must get acclimatized to handling hot food in their fingers. Accompanying this, I had an iced mint tea.

We followed with marinated and grilled boneless butterflied chicken breast, dipped in a honey-nutmeg sauce, caramelized apricots, roasted almonds and sesame seeds for Sharon and a "Sultan's Kabob Feast" for me, including three skewers of chicken, lamb, and beef kabobs, all cooked perfectly; not the least bit dry or over rare. Sharon's chicken was flavorful and moist (an accomplishment with a boneless breast).

Oh, and the bellydancers...As I reclined on pillows, surrounded by the aromatic tobacco smoke of my hookah, the Sultan's favorite entered the tent, her waist engirdled in golden medallions, her smile demurely obscured by her veil...Actually, the dancing was pretty straightforward and tasteful; there were many families with small children, and two big blonde cornfed boys were egged on by their parents to have a picture taken with the dancer by their younger sister.

I would have liked to have Baclava for dessert, but both of us were too full to partake.

Once a beach umbrella had found it's way into the back of the Allroad, Sharon and I were off for the 5.5 hour drive to Savannah. It's a straight shot down I-95 among the innumerable cars (many of the SUV and RV persuasion) with "New Jersey" and "New York" license plates. For the most part, an easy drive as long as you don't expose yourself too the panoply of speed ambushes that South Carolina hides behind every overpass and speck of median vegetation.

Our retreat is the Eliza Thompson house, built in 1847, it is now a bed and breakfast including both the main house and a carriage house surrounding a brick courtyard with koi nosing around a fountain and cafe umbrellas for the daily breakfasts.

Soon after we had unpacked, we ventured down Bull Street to assimilate some of the flavor of the town. Savannah's residents are lucky to have a town of squares, leafy, be-statued respites from a typical grid. At one instance will be a square dedicated to a Polish count stricken by grapeshot attempting to take the town from the British during the Revolutionary War, to an Indian chief, who welcomed Savannah's first colonists with open arms.

Tomo Chi-Chi.

In this late afternoon, the town was hushed and humid--not many tourists prowling the streets. We encountered a cool and airy cafe (from where I am typing this entry) known as "Gallery Espresso", a bohemian haunt for SCAD (Savannah College of Art and Design) students and locals that has become a daily stop for us in our short stay here. It is populated with comfortable, threadbare, and stained armchairs and couches, and an 3-gruppo (Faema E61's) espresso machine of a make I'm not familiar with.

As expected, Savannah's streets are wide and lined with Spanish Moss-laden trees. We walk north towards the Savannah river and the rather touristy River Street, packed with restaurants and shops in what used to be Savannah's bustling cotton warehouses.

Our first meal in Savannah was at the Olde Pink House, a classic Savannah location, one of the oldest buildings in town, its pink coloration originally coming from red clay bricks bleeding through white stucco. The meal (Sharon's being scallops with eggplant, mine being a simple strip steak) was well prepared, not lacking in flavor, but perhaps in fireworks or originality.

According to the traditional Johns Hopkins terminology, I am now a "Junior Assistant Resident"; no longer directly in the line of fire for Tylenol and Sonata orders, no longer doing 25 post-op checks for the Ortho service, no longer the default victim of "make the Intern do it"-itis.

Just this level of removal from being the sealing compound in the cracks of modern healthcare permits a bit more consideration of what may be going on with a patient. Last month in the Surgical Intensive Care Unit was rewarding partly because working with such astute nurses is a joy, but working with sicker, more critically ill patients pumps a little more "juice" and thoughtfulness into the job.

And now, though my Intern-year vacation was April, I'm on vacation yet again. As my allocated two weeks for JAR-year, I may well not see another vacation for more than a year. Even so, I enjoy having this little bit of space in my life. I tore apart my espresso machine to identify a balky hot water valve, and gave it a particularly satisfying cleaning--I feel as if I'm recovering some dormant facets of my life. I'm enjoying my espresso, roasting my beans, perusing the active little Internet subculture of espresso-enthusiasts.

Three more call nights. My pager went off 152 times the last one. This frenzy of beeping/vibrating will shake the equanimity of the calmest of dispositions. I'm still not sure I've recovered entirely from this assault.

The picures above: a sunlit bench at the NC Botanical Gardens, and David Seo roasting the groom at Dave Yoo's wedding.

A Nikon D2H paired currently with a Sigma 15-30 EX. I'm slowly learning how to use it, and am having fun in the meantime! By this point, I think I'd pushed my Canon G3 as far as it could go. The above pictures taken at the NC Botanical Gardens. From about 140 exposures, I got perhaps 10 that I was happy with compositionally and qualitatively. I've been saving the images in NEF (RAW) format and using Adobe Photoshop and its Camera Raw plug-in to save to my Powerbook.

What better way to combine creativity, digital technology, and the outdoors?

The day opened unpromisingly with rain, and concluded sadly with rain. The clouds, oppressively low set, the temperature in the 40's, the light hard and concreted.

Today was our trip into the Tuscan countryside to see the hill towns of Pienza, Montepulciano, and Cortona with Jonathan Arthur, a Cornish expatriate who moved to Italy with his artist wife sixteen years ago to start his family. As we sped down the Autostrada in a Benz stationwagon with a wheezy differential, I queried him about the Italian martial character ("They are not a very militartistic lot...they had two sorts of battles, of maneuver and by siege...they would maneuver for most of the spring and summer until they found a good flat spot for a battle, assemble their forces, muck about for a bit--at the Battle of ______--they only man killed was an unfortunate fellow who fell off his horse and was trampled to death--stop for lunch and fight until nightfall..."), Italian eating habits (White Collar: start at 0900, stop at 1300, have a substantial lunch, take a nap, and work again between 1600 and 2000, a snack for dinner. Blue Collar: start at 0800, quick snack for lunch, stop at 1800, and a big dinner), olive oil (Tuscany is about the most northern range for olives. Farther south, the typical method of harvesting them is laying a net below the trees to catch the olives, but more northerly, they must be picked by hand. Extra virgin being the early harvests with the greatest "bite". [note from my own study that virtually all virgins are hand-picked because fallen olives can bruise and then ferment and rot]).

The first stop, Pienza, a genuine Renaissance town, because this newcomer (construction starting in 1459), was purely a production of Pope Pius II, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, who erected the town on the site of his birthplace village Corsignano as an ideal town to one day rival Siena (supposedly Piccolomini was still piqued that his noble family was exiled from Siena to Corsignano). It never reached this stage in spite of the fact that Pius II prompted his cardinals to build their own pallazi there, and the fact that Piccolomini issued a Papal Bull optimistically christening Pienza a "city". After his death, there was no further impetus for subsequent popes to pay it much mind, and it remains a small town famous more for Pecorino cheese than a rival to Siena.

Of that cheese I can't say enough. We walked into a cheese shop there and were enveloped in the earthy, pungent odor of Pecorino. There were many varieties lying open on the shelves from Pecorino stagronato nella Vinaccia (leftover grape pressings), to Pecorino di Fossa (buried in a hole, forcing the bacteria to work anaerobically), to Pecorino al Tartufo (scented with truffles), to Pecorino semi stagronato (very old, covered with bay leaves and a musty-looking mold, but heavenly in taste), and then Pecorino Fresco (the youngest). These cheeses are wine-like in the complexity of their bouquet, the differences in age contributing to their different characters. After sampling them in the cheese store (we bought a great deal and vacuum-packed them for transport), all I could think of all day was that damn cheese.

The town itself is tiny and often described in the travel books as jewel-like. This is a suitable description because it is small and inset, almost artificial in it's antiquary perfection. It was here that Zefferelli filmed Romeo & Juliet and the town does seem lost in time. There is a beautiful path that overlooks the Tuscan country side (see the photos below). After an all too brief stop (and an encounter with a ferociously docile hotel cat), on to Montefollonico for a wine tasting with a very small estate bottled vintner.

Our winemaker is a retired professor of philosophy who was pulled into his old family business. His entire effort is concentrated in a small 14th century cantine. A bit cluttered, raising some initial skepticism in me somewhat, but the proof is in the pudding so they say, and after sampling his "Super Tuscan" Acerone IGT and his Nobile di Montepulciano Riserva DOCG we were believers. I do think the wines we tasted could use some aging so will likely sock them away for 5 years or so.

We then had lunch at "13_______" which is run by a handsome divorcee who used to run the same restaurant with her husband who then ran off with a younger woman. According to Jonathan, the town divided itself along the lines of those supporting her dining at her place, and those supporting her ex-husband and his mistress going to their new restaurant (which is now out of business). I initially ordered coniglio or rabbit but they were out so had grilled lamb instead, and started with truffle-scented gnocchi. My sister began with marinated Tuscan vegetables, and then had roasted duck, my father had tagliatelle with truffle sauce, and my mother a Tuscan vegetable soup with bread.

Finally, on to Cortona, a town first inhabited by the Umbrians, then the Estruscans, then the Romans, then sacked by the Goths, the a free comune during the 11th century, then a subject of the Kingdom of Naples, and then a subject of Florence. It's this town that lives under Frances Mayes's Tuscan sun. One story of the filming of the Diane Lane movie is that the producers decided that they must have fountain in the main square (which did not exist beforehand), but that the elderly ladies of the town found its endowment to be scandalous which resulted in the unfortunate fountain's emasculation. We didn't spend much time in Cortona as the day was coming to a close and we still had a drive to go for our return to Florence. Before 11 September it would have been mobbed with tourists. This has diminished somewhat since. We did see a wonderfully well-behaved dog, Tango, who resides under a shelf of ceramics in the main square.

Today was a museum day. We had a guide, Simone, take us through the highlights of the Accademia (where Michelango's David stands forever looking off in the distance, contemplating the upcoming battle), and the Uffizi (old Italian for "Office"). Ironically, in my studies of modern art in college, Greenberg's school of art criticism concentrates on the turn away from perspective and figurative art to the two-dimensional, stylized and gestural; whereas the transition from the medieval to Renaissance is the opposite, moving from non-perspectival, flatness of Byzantine iconography with no shadows and no sense of depth--no sense in their religious imagery that Christ or the Virgin Mary might be mortals that we can connect to emotionally--to Giotto's early 14th Century Madonna Enthroned hints of shadows in the draping of the Madonna's robes, and of breasts, and the first intimations that these are more than icons, abstractions staring from the candlelit recesses of a medieval church.

Thus Brunelleschi's "discovery" of perspective began drawing figures out of the flatness of a painted medium, allowing subsequent artists to dissociate images from the iconographic, allowing depth both figuratively and psychologically as paintings allowed their subjects to become more human. Witness Fillipo Lippi's Madonna and Child with Two Angels--the Madonna, exquisitely beautiful (a fallen nun no less as Lippi who was raised by monks ironically had a habit of seducing pretty nuns), exquisitely real, holding a baby who looks like a real baby surrounded by angels that no longer float abstractly in the air, but are grounded.

Of course, Michelangelo considered painting inferior to sculpture, and his work is preeminently humanist, with David representing a non-Christian Classical theme, ambivalent in gesture and expression, his sling at rest--about to be used? or in laxity after use? To place his sculpture in context, one has to remember that the practice of the day was to make plaster models of a sculpture and use a special device to triangulate points in a piece of marble to guide the chiseller. In essence, the final step of sculpting marble was a mechanical, rather than an artistic process. Michelangelo abhorred the idea of treating marble as a blank medium and sought to chisel or reveal directly from his blocks the "essence" of that piece. For instance, the block of marble from which David emerged was known as Il Gigante. A challenge in Carraramarble; sixteen feet high, impossibly narrow, filligreed with cracks; the victim of a half-hearted attempt by Agostino di Duccio; refused by Da Vinci. In Michelangelo's mind, David was living inside the whole time.

This is actually the second time I've seen David, and he seems more ambivalent a gesture than the first time. Seemingly relaxed, but the tensile character of his right leg, the veins throbbing from his right forearm and hand, the trace of jugular, he really seems ready to spring into action for all the relaxation of his pose, which perhaps really is a pose.

In the Uffizi, we saw, among the aforementioned Giotto and Fillipo Lippi, Botticelli's Birth of Venus and Primavera.

Yesterday, my sister was complaining that her chest hurt. After I drew an ABG, ordered a stat EKG, and stat cardiac enzymes, my parents and I left her to her with John and set out on our own. It had rained in the morning, but we were optimistic that there wouldn't be any further precipitation and set out in search of pizza. We crossed the Arno, and began our reconnaisance in earnest. A flanking maneuver on the south side of the Piazza della Signoria found us in the Pizzeria il David where we found ourselves next to a elderly, but hale English couple. Though the service was slow, we had a good Pizza Napoli and a Pizza with sausage. The crust was thin and crispy, the toppings minimalist, just enough to provide flavor, not overburden the crust.

In the meanwhile the sky lowered and we began to notice people hastily moving inside with us. It had started raining quite heavily, with a healthy breeze, and a significant drop in temperature. As we left il David, it grew heavier, and we had to take shelter in the Aringhiera in the piazza along with hundreds of other tourists, shivering as the breeze whipped through the square.

Finally, the deluge lifted a bit, and in these little lacunae in the day's tempest, we finally made our way to the Palazzo Pitti, the final headquarters of the Medici clan, and home to their enormous art collection. As I've mentioned the palazzo is a rusticated monstrosity. The artwork is arranged pretty much as the Medicis kept it, in other words, not in a curatorial or chronologic order. This makes it hard to properly appreciate its interspersed Filippo Lippis, Caravaggios, Titians, and Rubens, where the Uffizi makes the thematic progression up to the Renaissance, the Mannerist era, and on much clearer (more about that later).

I don't have any good pictures that properly convey the cold and the rain, but have this one of my mother exiting the Palazzo Pitti to blue, virtually immaculate skies:

As we walked home, with the sun returned from his brief hiatus, there were these scenes along the street:

Once we returned home, I found my sister and John in repose:

I should probably take some time to describe the Villa Bobolino. It was built around 1880, with the typical villa configuration; three stories, French doors opening out onto upper floor terraces. The owner is a Dutch woman that I haven't had a chance to meet yet. She bought the villa a few years ago and had it remodeled recently. It's a bit fanciful--modern Chronicles of Narnia, but has some nice Phillipe Starck pieces. It's been featured in some Dutch magazines and is nicer than some of the ponderous antique filled places we saw in the catalogs when deciding on a villa. With the French doors unshuttered it's airy and quite, yes, romantic. Pictures soon.

This morning we arose early-ish only to find that my father had blown the villa's fuses with his 110V hairdryer. He said that it practically melted in his hand. This required an emergency consultation with Messr De Looze, our landlord and was expeditiously remedied. We then set off for the Mercato Centrale. The main food market for Florence just northeast of the Piazza San Lorenzo. The market is housed in an enclosure and is filled with a variety of butchers, greengrocers, fishmongers. The pictures below give a sense of the variety of alimentari sold there. Particularly interesting is an Italian delicacy known as the Dirty Bird. It is also known by its Latin name as Foulus fowlus. While one would think this bird to be very rare, it is actually quite common. For instance part of its North American range is known to be a stretch of 70 in Raleigh between Brier Creek and Crabtree Valley Mall. Many Dirty Birds may be found squawking about a certain parking lot in the evening hours. The best way to prepare a Dirty Bird is to flatten him under a brick and grill him ( Pollo Squalore Griglio).

At the Mercato Centrale: Fish, Beef "Ahem" Oysters, Infused Oils, Strawberries, Octopus, A particularly colorful Fruitstand, Vegetables, Dried Mushrooms, and Olives

Addendum, 7 April 2004
After resting in the early afternoon we ventured out again to Via de´Tornabuoni where royalty such as Salvatore Ferragamo (among the snottiest salespeople I've ever encountered, but really nice leathergoods and those classic Ferragamo ties), to Gucci jewelery (an extremely friendly and courteous young lady there), to Prada (where the sales staff were kept extremely busy by the constant flow of customers--including my sister and myself for sunglasses), to Pucci (a Florence native, my sister coveted a short short skirt that was labeled at 1700 Euros), to Giorgio Armani (where my father chatted with a Swedish saleswoman, trying to guess her nationality, who admitted that she wasn't the usual towering height of her fellow countrymen), to Gucci clothing (where I contemplated Tom Ford's last collection for them and the fact that I could never get away with tight-fitting Western inspired shirts and boots).

In the evening, we prepared dinner with our market purchases. Soon the house was suffused with the aroma of olive oil, basil, sauteed shallots with which my mother prepares her mussels. To start with we had carciofi or artichokes dipped in lemon butter, followed by the mussels, and then spaghetti with vongole little clams that you don't find very often in the US. The artichokes and mussels struck me as being more tender than their American counterparts. The mussels were also meatier.

Again, I awoke late. I suppose my internal clock is out of whack with the change in timezone. The original plan had been to hit the Mercato Centrale, but it closes at 1400, and I was dressed by 1310. Instead, we caught a cab to Esselunga--Florence's equivalent to Star Market (Stah Mahket). Unfortunately, we were to learn that our cab driver over took us for a ride because the fare over was almost 20 Euros where the ride back was 8.60 Euros.

Pictures below:

Waiting for our "ride" to the supermarket, carciofi at Esselunga, and dining al fresco at Villa Bobolino:

There really isn't much to say about Italian supermarkets. They are pretty much the same as ours (I was disappointed to find). I had hopes that their food-oriented culture would make even a run-of-the-mill supermarket a better than Whole Foods cornucopia, but no, pretty much the same. A lot of pre-packaged junk foods, convenience foods. Just a lot more bottled water.

We walked out of there with a couple hundred Euros worth of groceries, caught the non-rip-off cab home and ate a simple al fresco snack of bread, cheese, meats, and fruit on the terrace.

After arriving at the Villa Boboli around midnight last night, and reading for an hour about the Florence's conflicted past, I slipped into a profound slumber which could have continued indefinitely excepting my mother's knock at 1000 this morning. After all of us got ready, we ventured out on foot past the Porta Romana and down Via Romana, past the Piazza Pitti where we stopped at a cafe for lunch of coffee, lightly grilled panini, insalata Cesare, and piatti Sfzi___. I had a Campari Orange too.

We then continued on to the Arno which we crossed on the Ponte Vecchio (incidentally the only bridge not severed during the Second World War, the Arno being an important strategic line in the Italian campaign), the closer we came to the bridge the more tourists there were, festooned in their Oakleys, Pumas, and athletic gear that have become the uniform of travelers everywhere.

The weather was high sixties and dry. Perfect for sightseeing. Alas, no Baedekers or "Macintosh squares" here (see Merchant Ivory's film adaptation of A Room with a View).

Since this was a "familiarization" walk and there was no point in trying to see sights while the turisti were out in force, we just walked through the key spots: the Piazza Uffizi, the Duomo, the Piazza Santissima Annunziata with its statue of Ferdinand I made from bronze molten down from Turkish cannons from the Battle of Lepanto. This last plaza also houses on it's eastern aspect the Spedale degli Innocenti, a foundling's hospital (and likely the first in the world) where there used to be a rotating window where unwanted babies used to be abandoned until the late 19th century. Another feature are tondi featuring babies in swaddling clothes.

We rested there and then made our way back by way of the Via Cavour, passing the upscale shopping area (and stopping briefly in a Miu Miu boutique) and back across Ponte Vecchio. We detoured into the Bobolino Gardens financed by a visionary who made his fortune with pre-baked pizza crusts imported to the United States...just kidding...The gardens are the only central public gardens in the town and were comissioned by the Medicis. They lie behind the Palazzo Pitti and stretch a long ways southwest. The palace's backside has a courtyard and entrance where you can easily imagine horse-drawn carriages disembarking eminences of the time for a grand ball, or volta, or whatever it is they danced to. There is also a huge bathtub (carted off from the Roman baths in Caracalla). The garden lies astride a significant hill and provides dramatic views of Florence. Since my battery hadn't been charged in three days, alas there are no pictures currently. I'll have to go back for those.

The garden has long cypress-lined walks, many hiding places, and just feels suffused with history. At its highest point you can look west down upon a field of olive trees that looks just as you would imagine that spot where George first professes his admiration of Lucy in A Room with a View (and prompts her to play much Beethoven); suffused with sun, olive trees rustling in the breeze, wildflowers sprinkled about the grass.

After whiling away our time there, we made our way back to the Villa Bobolino where I downloaded my photos and we rested for a couple of hours until dinner time which we spent at Beccofino, a restaurant tucked between Ponte alla Carraia and Ponte Santa Trinitas. There we had Pea Soup with Mint, Risotto with Lard(!) and Celery Root, and Sea Bass Carpaccio followed by Tuscan Beef with Red Onions and Fingerling Potatoes, Roast Pigeon with Prunes, and Roasted "Baby" Chicken followed by Almond Cantucci, and Pistachio Mousse.

Then home. Then sleep (after reading for a few hours).

The pictures:

Morning, looking out on the terrace and garden:

Getting ready to set off, and looking in the distance off Ponte Vecchio:

A tondo on the foundling's hospital in the Piazza Santissima Annunziata:

A night time long exposure from the Ponte Santa Trinitas:

Leaving out of Raleigh-Durham yesterday afternoon I saw a mother beating her child in the Continental terminal..."You're ODD, Oppositional Defiance Disorder. I don't know what to do with you," I'm not sure I understand why some catchphrase pseudo-diagnosis might rationalize her boxing her son's little ears. I was embarrassed and appalled for everyone who saw this.

Tonight we leave out of JFK for Florence and a two week stay in the Villa Bobolino via Frankfurt. This includes a 8 hour layover in Germany for John, Eugenie and myself while my parents fly on ahead.

I'm presently in NYC where it's cold and drizzly. After a buzzy commuter flight to Dulles yesterday, I was imprisoned in a terminal tucked in the forolorn recesses of that airport for 5 hours before I could catch a flight last night to JFK. Then, after having 3 hours sleep over the last forty hours, I sunk, catatonic, for 8 hours sleep on Eugenie's couch.

This morning I picked up some croissants and madeleines at Balthazar. Their chocolate madeleine's are unctuous and...chocolatey (big surprise).

If you want to send a text message to my phone in Italy, try this. It may or may not work, but John, being well-traveled, says that SMS should work in Europe at no extra charge.

Below are a few pictures of Watson & Crick, my sister's little monsters:

MENU
Spinach Salad with Radishes & Onions
Pureed Celery Root with Potatoes, Gruyere & Saffron
Brasato di Maiale
Crostata di Mirtillo with Creme Anglaise

Christmas tradition is that the younger generation make the feast.

In the past I've done a goose (we like gamy birds); another year, a Welsh leg of lamb (with honey and thyme). Since the four of us have never actually been able to actually completely consume our Christmas dinner in the past, we went smaller, a bit homier this year with a recipe from Mario Batali (hands down runs the best cooking show on the Food Network) of pork shoulder braised in red wine with juniper berries, rosemary and pancetta, ringed with a salad of grilled scallions.

Brent at Wellspring found us a nice Boston Butt about 4 pounds, which was within the target range for something we could finish. My sister takes credit for interpreting Batali's recipe with aplomb, rendering a flavorful, complex, and tender (something we were fearful of not accomplishing) main dish. Eugenie also cheated by adding some butter at the finish. She also made the cranberry crostata, which has now become our traditional Christmas dessert. I went with the relatively simple Dean & Deluca recipe for celery root and potatoes. There is little chance of missing with such straightforward ingredients. Basically the celery root is pureed with heavy cream, butter and saffron, then incorporated with mashed russet potatoes and shredded Gruyere, topped with Gruyere, and thrown in the oven until the cheese on top is golden. My mother claimed that she couldn't taste the celery root--perhaps the gustatory receptors for celery root are variable from person to person.

Batali's recipe calls for marinating the shoulder for three days. Since we only bought the pork on Christmas day we cheated and marinated for one day and (including a stretch at room temp overnight--the room temp phase was more an oversight than intentional, as I'm not writhing in agony with bacterial dysentary, I think it was OK).

I got to keep my two front teeth for Christmas.

One thing about being here is that everything is always in motion, the sea of course moves constantly & breaks over the coral reef. Also the wind moves just about everything, the tent flaps animatedly around me, the pal fronds clatter like leafy scissors even the roots of the trees protrude out of the sand & vibrate some low harmony.

Transcription of my Belize travel journal continued

I spent last night in a hammock & rocking in the stiff breeze made me think about how such a life is so marked a contrast to our normal cosmopolitan lives. Here I am, yielding myself to the wind & the sand & the stars & at home I lie w/in 4 sound walls, in a temperature controlled environment, on a coil-sprung bed--there's practically nothing left to chance there. Here, I am at the mercy of the sea--only because she has been reasonably obliging have I been able to function comfortably. It is a totally different mindset & even though I've become used to living out-of-doors, I'm never totally comfortable--I'm always a bit worried that a turn of bad luck can turn life into something very unpleasant.

I probably need too much control over my environment, at home I have many mechanisms to assert that control (as meager as they are). Outdoors, I feel a constant drive to maintain some orderliness, perhaps I should go with the flow more. Which kind of person is better at surviving? Not just here, but in general.

I do have to sit back & appreciate what I have here--who would believe us when I tell them I slept in a hammock, rocked by the wind looking up through the rustling fronds of a coconut tree to the stars?

The last few evenings I've been thinking about xxxxx ...

...& it was my birthday 4 days ago, I'm a quarter of a century years-old, what do you make of that? & now I've been thinking I should take a year off & go to Mariner's school. Is this a silly dream worthy of a quarter century old-timer, or a silly reverie of youth? I have such a vivid image in my mind of a tilted deck of a boat going into the wind close-hauled--it must be the coastal ancestry exerting its distant memories.

My Belize travel journal, continued

We ventured off Pumpkin after goodbyes to Dash (a terrific dog w/caramel colored eyes & a mane like a lion's). Yesterday's wind had diminished to a breeze & paddling was much easier. On the way here we stopped at Round Caye, an uninhabited island w/dense palms, a tiny beach & a shore cluttered w/coral stones--the detritus of a fecund sea. We wandered around a bit & contemplated an old conch shell, its corners worn smooth--it looked petrified, prehistoric & I begin to think how we have histories of our civilizations but the reef & the fishes around it don't. All we see when we snorkle or SCUBA are brief glimpses, we don't know the narrative of the coral ramparts of the reef here on the the Silks--the interplay of weather, water, stone, & fish.

The Silks are three cayes arranged in a delta w/the vertices pointing North, West, & South. They are beautiful, almost stereotypical, save for the little bit of trash on the one we're on. After Danny speared three good-sized hogfish for us we two snorkled off the reef. On the outside it's about 30 feet deep--really deeper than I've seen w/my own two eyes--that's the thing about snorkeling, what we see on the surface is so completely different from what we see under water--it's a fair kingdom of brightly colored inhabitants & massive fortresses w/delicate hanging gardens of fan coral. It's astoundingly otherworldly--I know how an astronaut would feel if he set foot on an inhabited planet.

For dinner I cooked up the hogfish in tomatoes, onions, habanero, soya sauce, a dash of lime--A-OK, the boys were satisfied.

More from my Belize travel journal

After a hard paddle against the prevailing Northeasterly wind we arrived at Pumpkin Caye whose sole inhabitants are a dog "Dash" and the caretaker "Shaky"--he's a deformed elderly man who scratches out a lonely existence on this craggy little island. We spent the day there at my behest--I found the wind hard going& frustratingly slow & the thought of another 5 or so miles wasn't something I had any desire to undertake.

Treally, the rest of the day was lost to me--I had a touch too much sun and was put out w/a headache & some nausea.

After making dinner for the boys I went straight to bed.

As the sun makes its leisurely, orange-tinged descent down the horizon, I reflect on our first day in the cayes.

It seems that bumpy rides are the theme of this trip--after packing we took an hour long skiff ride to our present location. Closer into Placencia we had a 3-4 foot chop that was truly kidney and gonad shattering. It was a thrill though. We finally arrived at a reasonable approximation of paradise--sandy beaches, wind-bent coconut palms.

I had my first introduction to snorkeling here and it was honestly an introduction to a world I've never known. It is still strange to me that you can breath and look underwater at the same time. Sometimes I'd find myself holding my breath forgetting that I didn't have to.

Even though the coral here is modest in comparison to the Silk Cayes according to Danny, I saw a lushness in both flora & fauna that I've never been able to perceive in such little space.

The light's failing now so I'll stop.

Further transcription of my Belize travel journal

After riding through the waste of a banana plantation, we entered the forest--it was only a secondary rain forest that has grown up over an old logging area but it provided some introduction to the abundance of rain forest here.

The ride there was an amusingly bone-jarring trip in a beaten Chevy van all spot-welded together. Its driver, our guide Ellis, is a wiry fellow w/a huge mop of hair and particularly musical Creole accent. He emphasizes each consonant equally "There's a fucking sol-it-ary eagle." His eyes are sharp, he can be cussing & jiving away swiping the van back and forth on the dirt roads & spot a toucan up in a tree at 200 yards.

Along w/us are two sunbrowned and attractive American girls--one blonde, one brunette. I didn't speak with them much--they seemed young, a young Placencian fellow brought them along, apparently the brown-haired one is his girlfriend & I wonder about the pretty American girls you find in places like these, smoking their cigarettes, diddling the young locals--I find it all a bit alluring but I don't really understand it.

Ellis shows us leaf-cutter ant trails, how you can use the soldiers to suture wounds together, the amazing variety of flora: custard apple trees, rubber trees, philodendrons, heliconias, birds of paradise. I admire all these & I xxxxxx xxx xxxxxx xxxxx xxxxxx xxx--xxx xxxxxx xx xxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxx xx xxxxxxx xxxxxxx x xxxxxxxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx. xxxx, xxx x xx xx xxxxxx x xxxxxx xxxx.

After an equally bone-jarring ride back (1.20 hours), we drop off the Serenity girls (that's where they are staying) & motor home to pick up the bread (15 loaves) for the trip to the cayes. The lady who makes the bread is a cheerful giggly lady called Miss Lydia who cheerfully hands us our bread in here cheerful kitchen, we also get some cherry pops wrapped in cellophane from her--mine ruptures and I drip red juice all over myself.

For dinner, we join the Millers, John, his dad Harry & John's blonde (in all the connotations of the term Colleen) girlfriend. Oddly enough, all the way in the Carribean I'm eating a respectable plate of Chicken Chow Mein seasoned w/the local Habanero sauce.

The Millers are eminently practical men--the father was a forest ranger, the son a marketing instructor in the local college business school (Chico State). They've been in Belize for 2 weeks hence. They drove down in a non-stock 4-wheeler pickup truck w/a camper, a motorcycle and a powerboat. Both are husky fellows w/jolly but disciplined temperaments. Alot of common sense, and the facility to repair just about everything in sight. They love telling stories & you learn a lot by listening because they have encountered so many mechanical problems & such & have found solutions for them.

Further transcription of my Belize travel journal

A day of decompression & reminiscences of high school days. A lot of it was spent on the beach looking across the ble-green waters to the cayes moored like fronded ships in the distance. Danny & I talked a lot about the people we remember, the things we did back in Durham. Belize, unlike Alaska, is spacious--the sky is a wide blue bowel w/massive fortress-like clouds scudding through it. This spaciousness is amenable to expansive thoughts & remembrances--& I'm beginning to think that I might need to spend more time out & w/the water w/a mint-green bow streak behind me. Maybe I should do the Mariner's school.

Part of what I want in a xxxx is a window into another world of preception, & since I haven't found that (FK's control xxxx xxxxxxx seems now so insular & self-conscious), I'll take the world & ocean & sky as that--maybe I should have started with that.

I'm getting a better sense of the town & its cluttered ramshackle ways--there's little need for propriety, its utterly casual, loping along the boys I see, a little buzzed, taking what it can get. So far I'm loving it.

Strangely, K's being a bit linear & I'm being a bit loopier (a reversal of what I expected, maybe I'm mellowing).

A transcription of my Belize travel journal

After a satisfying dinner of conch fritters and pork chops, esconced in a hammock w/the Carribean breeze blowing the sand flies away, it's difficult to wrap my mind around the fact that I was stuck in the quotidian rhythms of medical school, & here I am on a sandy, palm treed spit of land, pointing out, like a little finger into the heart of the Carribean.

Placencia is a little town of shanties nestled among the coconut trees. Life appears as easygoing as the cadences of the creole spoken here. Children wander the street in droves carrying smaller children.

The people here are attractive--some unusual mix of pirate and slave--they amble among the trees, you can see them cooking in their stilt-legged homes; when you say hello they say "OK". A simple affirmation of a simple life.

It's our first afternnon & evening, & I'm appreciating the distance from the internecine pressures of school--my only goal for now is to live happily, secure in my knowledge that the only obstacle to this goal is myself. It's to juice myself up after the slow leakage of the last couple of months.

My desk faces southwest and sunrise is washing a hazy peach ribbon across Chapel Hill's heights. Logically, it's all the sun's angle on our latitude, and the refraction and reflection of light with dust and moisture in the air; but how unsatisfying is this reduction--no justice to the miraculous concoction of scattered light that makes that roseate glow, or how the subtle breeze stirs the netting of bare tree limbs that frames this sight.

And it happens every day.

Three hundred and sixty-five times a year it arrives like clockwork, unheralded; also, at least 365 times a year someone spills their milk, helps someone across the road, cuts someone off in traffic, makes a new friend, loses another. The earth keeps spinning, the planets keep aligning and disaligning. As they say, life goes on.

So every day, even with the miracle that is a sunrise, you hope for something different, something that heightens things beyond that constant spinning. At the same time, when this doesn't happen, as unfortunate as you may feel, you have to tell yourself that Apocalypse won't occur suddenly, the glaciers won't melt, Hatteras Lighthouse won't sink into the sea.

The proposed design for the Freedom Tower in Lower Manhattan. Herbert Muschamp writes that it's better than we have any right to expect from a compromise collaboration--let's hope so.

It's a paradox I suppose, but we're a hopeful species that yearns for something miraculous while living our lives among miracles we stop seeing.

Explanations are often unsatisfying the same way equations of particles and light explain away a sunrise. At work, I seek them, but acknowledge that even a good explanation doesn't necessarily get to the heart of the matter. In spite of this, when it comes to breast cancer, I don't stop.

On the other hand, when it comes to your life, you oftentimes must stop. I used to keep on searching for explanations, but found that only breeds dissatisfaction and unhappiness.

So I'll stop here.

At the same time, I regretfully accept that the earth keeps spinning.

"Someday, perhaps, the memory of even these things will be pleasant"
--from the Aeneid (no doubt this should the motto for internship!)

Thinking of happiness again. After a week adjusting to the new milieu of Durham Regional, I looked forward to settling in at a table at Foster's. After two cappucino's and the omelet special around noon, a sour-faced lady suggested I leave because "we ask that you not study on brunch days" and that there were people waiting (incidentally there were free tables and undergrads scattered throughout...studying).

I left not having the energy to argue.

To pump my spirits up I read parts of A River Runs Through It to myself. What a jewel of a book.

Yesterday constituted my last day in the Durham VA Hospital. I've come to know and respect many of my patients there, but the VA is a taxing place. The paperwork demands there intrude on patient care rather than facilitate it; and, well, it's a government agency.

My hopes that my Sunday would be uneventful never came to be. Suffice it to say that I got perhaps 1.5 hours of sleep.

Worse, I was informed that in spite of my being post-call, I was to report first thing in the morning to Durham Regional and scrub in a case. Being sleep deprived and worn down by the frictions of the VA service doesn't exactly spawn much enthusiasm for being required in an OR across town the next morning, but I went.

Once in though, everything else just melted away. It was just the beep of the monitors, the sound of the bipolar cautery, the ratchet-click of clamps, the simple satisfaction of tying knots. Yes. This is why I chose surgery.

In the last day, I've been contemplating survival.

No doubt that internship is physically, psychologically, and morally taxing; and that there are more enjoyable--and perhaps fruitful--ways of spending a year of one's life. Yet some of us manage without becoming too embittered while others become "toxic" and frustrated. What's the difference?

Internship is a necessary evil. Unfortunately 90% of one's time and effort is spent doing rather unenlightening things--but you still have to go through it because the remaining 10% you just can't get anywhere else except by being the junior house officer on the line at 3 am when your patient's urine output and blood pressure are sinking.

The "operational tempo" of being your patients' primary caregiver--to borrow a military term--forces us to interact with other people to a level uncommon in other professions. I enjoy these interactions on the whole, and the good ones far outweigh the bad ones in my mental balance. For instance, there's a nurse that I've become good friends with that I'd be ecstatic to work with as my Nurse Clinician once I've built a practice. I think you can develop lasting professiona/personal relationships if you try to maintain a reasonably positive outlook in your life as an intern.

One intern told me yesterday that she used the F-word in the middle of a supermarket after the cashier refused to accept her check for 12 bags of groceries. "I'm never like that!"

Another fellow intern asked me how I put up with it especially since I'm a bit older and could easily have chosen a different career path.

I don't know.

I can only guess that some mechanism in me extracts or perceives the good things over the bad things. I wish I had a formula.

Perhaps it's the little things. After rounding my patients a second time in the late morning and checking their labs, I walked over to the Duke Gardens. And looking across the greensward, with squirrels stirring the leaf litter behind me, an Indian Summer sun, the gothic edifice of Duke South rising in the distance, I could feel the knots loosening a little, probably just enough for me to maintain my sanity.

The deck was an impasto of white paint, streaked with rust stains, and he was nervous. It had been perhaps 15 years since, and this time he was alone. This metal deck he was looking at was liquid once, and now it was frozen, and slowly flaking underneath that paint. It growled beneath him as they reversed the engines and the landscape stopped moving.

He lifted his fiberglass shell to his shoulder. Clumsy on land, lithe in the water.

On the rocky shore he loaded it, balancing, and stuffing it from gunwhale to gunwhale. The water here was fishy and oil-streaked; he would leave that behind soon.

With a rasp, and a wobble, he was off and cutting into the opaque water. A light chop, the wind behind him. Rotating with each stroke he sought his rhythm--he would find it in a couple of days. Meanwhile the gravity was subsiding, it's pull first sliding away from his arms, his core, then his belly.

At the moment, he could feel everything: the breeze finding its way into his unzipped collar, rounding his shoulders, lifting the short hairs behind his neck; the brine dripping off the splash rings and pattering on his sprayskirt; the oscillations of his kayak into the chop; the slow wink of his marine radio.

So I've had a couple of days off and have found an ability to envelope myself in sleep (and bedclothes) that I never knew existed. Save one thing...

My dreams are saturated with the white-tiled, fluorescently lit hallways of the hospital. I wake up agonizing about urine output or hypoxemia.

I'm generally able to impose a barrier between home and work, but these last couple weeks of nights have imprinted the hospital's patterns in my synapses.

The leaves are darkening and edging into color. The sun's acquired that auburn cast, and there's a vein of briskness in the mornings and evenings where there once was a humid mist-cloak. And it's now our fourth rotation of the year. The rotation on the churning General Thoracic service is over and I've just finished yet another week as Night Float, this time on the "colored" Red/Gree/Purple and Pediatric services.

Luckily, no codes this time.

But now that I have a couple of days off, my clock is entirely discombobulated having spent two of the last three weeks on nights.

For the first time in a long while, I had the luxury of sitting down to read, and try to thoughtfully put together a writeup for the Society of University Surgeons.

Incidentally, Go Red Sox.

And, let's give Arnold a chance and see what he can do. There are many paths to political success, and I certainly don't think that planning to be President from kindegarten on is any more legitimate than being a surgeon or being an actor first.

Another night, another code, another lost patient. During this month's rotation, the Night Floats the past two weeks had no worse than calling security to help catch a disoriented, combative little old lady; and now in the last three days there've been two codes on the floor. This last one we ran for 35 minutes, shocked more than I can count, and ran through just about every med in the cart, to no avail.

My pager goes off: "There's an emergency in room X". The JAR and fellow are already in the room. He's bagged. V-Fib. Clear. Epi. Shock. Shock. Shock. RT is here. Intubate. She starts compressions. I shoulder in and relieve her--compressions are extremely fatiguing and you need to relieve the person delivering them. Rhythm? Pulse? Clear. Shock. Pulse? Compressions. The JAR and fellow start placing chest tubes on both sides. Stop compressions. More Epi. Rhythm? Pulse? I hit the charge button and grab the paddles. His chest is a slick of conductive gel. Clear. Shock. Pulse? Round after round. V-Fib. Pulse? Shock. Shock. V-Fib. Vasopressin. Bicarb. Amio. Lidocaine. Torsades. Magnesium. Do we have Bretylium? We're running out of ideas. Finally we call it. The pitched whine of the defibrillator charge chime in the background. We've given the unfortunate fellow every chance we could. A medicine resident turns it off.

His mother is a huddled wreck wrapped in a blanket in the waiting room. The Chaplain is stuck in another code situation. We sit down with her.

Later, after the rest of the family arrives, there's a horrific wail that echoes down the corridors. The other residents are dealing with an MI in the unit. I'm sorry, we tried everything. I know you all did. Thank you. His wife's knee is quaking.

Monsters & Goblins come out at night.

This week I've been serving as the "Night Float" for the Cardiothoracic service, meaning the interns during the day hand their patients off to me at 1730, I tuck them in and take care of any issues that may crop up overnight, as well as attend to any work that couldn't be finished during the day.

Unfortunately I lost a patient the other night. We still are trying to piece together why. His family dealt with it with as much aplomb as you could imagine, but declined an autopsy, meaning that we'll never have a definitive explanation of what happened. I've made clear to the upper levels that I am completely open to any advice on things that I omitted to do, or should have done better; but overall, I think we ordered the appropriate tests, and made the appropriate moves. In retrospect, (and the attending physician called me directly the morning after to discuss this--a slightly nerve-wracking experience), it would have been better to have transferred the patient to the intensive care unit.

The patient likely would have coded there as well, but these are the places to be if something like this is going to happen.

The problem is that while he was foremost in my mind among the patients I was covering, I didn't see him as being so precipitously unstable. His family also notes that he seemed fine all the way up to the moment that he became unresponsive. Interestingly, the nurses tell me afterward that the family would have rather have let him go quietly rather than calling a code.

I get heartburn less than once a year, but had to guzzle a quarter of a bottle of Maalox to prevent my stomach from auto-digesting the rest of the evening. The nurses sympathetically minimized calls the rest of the night.