Hi.

One of these days I’m going to start writing again…  Forget it- I’ll just write already.

As you can see, Jon and I have returned from our travels.  Sorry the writing fizzled out there towards the ends- we were trying to soak up our last few days and couldn’t be bothered to sit in a computer lab. Let’s see if I can sum it up… 

We headed back to Paris where we collected our giant backpacks which we had locked up in lockers at the Paris train station before leaving for London, and then Brussels. That was probably the smartest thing we did on our entire trip! The next time I take a trip like this I think I’ll try to have a central home base where we can re-charge, re-pack, and rest in between forays to different locales. It’s a lot easier traveling around with just a weekender bag if you can.

We then headed to a hotel to round out our last two days in Europe. We did a lot of just hanging out in cafes and browsing through the neighborhood… but the one “site” we did manage to squeeze in was a trip to Paris’ Catacombs. That was pretty amazing. Back in the Times of Yore, they didn’t have preserving methods for bodies before burial. People in the neighborhood started getting so sick from all the diseases developing in the decaying bodies from the nearby cemetary that the government undertook a massive dig of the corpses.  They placed these remains in the maze of underground tunnels that exist underneath the streets and parks of Paris.  Now you can walk through some of these tunnels. There are bones and skulls piled neatly on top of each other from floor to ceiling. It is very surreal. Jane’s Addiction used a photo of the scene for their compilation album, “Up From the Catacombs”.

The weirdest part of it all though were the other people down there who kept posing with the bones and smiling… probably in the same way they had posed in front of the Eiffel Tower earlier in the day.  I wanted to shake them and say, “THESE WERE PEOPLE! WE ARE IN A MASS GRAVE!”.  I didn’t feel like it was an appropriate place to ham it up for the camera.  People become so desensitized… I feel like they weren’t even thinking about the horror and reality of it all.

So then we flew back to the States.  It’s crazy how quickly these things can all seem like a dream.  It was such an amazing trip. Someday I’ll go through all of our pictures and try to organize them in some sort of reasonable fashion. It’s such an endeavor though…

About a week after we returned, we hopped back on a plane and headed to NYC for Jon’s medical school graduation ceremony at Madison Square Garden. He graduated with Highest Honors! That was pretty awesome.  My mom came, and Jon’s mom, sister and brother. Jon’s mom took us all out to eat at this amazing restaurant called Per Se to celebrate. And Jon, my mom, and I went to see Wicked on Broadway, which was a lot of fun. I feel like it was my mom’s first vacation. We traveled a ton when we were kids but she always had some sort of conference to go to as well. So mostly it was just me, my sister and my dad doing all the fun stuff.

Now we have moved yet again. I think that marks 6 states in two years. Sheesh.  But we’re actually staying put here for awhile.  I’m finally getting my act together for grad school… and I’ll start taking classes at George Washington this Fall.  Jon has started his residency and seems to be liking it pretty well, although the hours are taking some getting used to. We have a big yard with a privacy fence and we’ve finally been able to install a doggie door which has been our “dream” for years. It’s the small things, man.

So that’s it for now.