semester 2 complete!

it was a good one! thankfully i passed all my exams, and now we're into "2nd year" - systems! this means we will now study just one subject at a time and have an exam every three or so weeks. we recently finished hematology, and now we're into endocrinology!

a few happenings of the last semester:

-holidays: purim (think jewish halloween), hag b'omer (collect scraps of wood all year so that they can be thrown into a huge bonfire that can be partied around), holocaust remembrance and israeli independence day (minutes of silence during which everything in israel stops, including all traffic on the freeways, followed by a huge party with epic fireworks right outside my apartment), ben-gurion university student day (live music all night; pool party all day).

-a disaster management module that was quite interesting

-ran the dead sea half marathon with a number of my classmates; the lowest race on earth!! 1:37; i was happy with that. afterward we got to swim in the extremely salty dead sea water, which felt great on some our freshly chaffed nipples - you can imagine the yelps!

-had the opportunity to go to two christian "student conferences" that involved jewish as well as arab believers. really good times and great to meet some people outside of beer sheva.

-msih prom: bringing the american high school experience to israel!

-some unplanned school-free rocket days (they come from gaza). after one, we made some young israeli friends hanging out in a bomb shelter. they took us to where one of the rockets had hit that day - it decimated a school. good reminder that it is important to hide when that siren goes off.

-during one rocket day i decided to head up to nablus, one of the largest palestinian cities in the west bank. its quite a trip from here - a bus to jerusalem, another through the checkpoint to ramallah, and yet another to nablus. really interesting place. i spent a few sweaty hours climbing mount gerizim which overlooks nablus, home of most of the last remaining samaritans of biblical fame. quasi-jews, they believe that the true site of the original temple was on mt. gerizim as opposed to in jerusalem. every year they hold a big ritual/sacrifice thing there. they even have their own ancient language. its a small community of about 800, and until very recently they strictly disallowed intermarriage with anyone else, so unfortunately they have all kinds of rare genetic diseases. from the mountain one looks down on the balata refugee camp, the most populous in the west bank. 30 000 people live in an area of 0.25 square km. in nablus i also went to beer yakoub/jacob's well, the place where jesus met the woman at the well, and ate the local delicacy - kunafa, which is made from soft goat cheese, butter and honey and comes in flourescent orange and green varieties. unfortunately, nablus has a reputation for being a very hostile place for anyone suspected of being israeli. i was approached by some young guys who tried speaking a few hebrew phrases to me to see if i knew it. that day i didn't know a word of hebrew - slightly less than what i'd know on a normal day. rumor has it that if they find out you speak hebrew, they'll lynch you right there on the street :(

-perhaps the most profound 3 hour conversation of the semester was with an american college student who had just finished 3 months of nonviolently documenting abuses of the occupation with christian peacemaker teams in hebron, palestine. check out some of his documentation of what's going down in hebron here: http://www.cpt.org/underattack. the occupation is so messed up, yet so intractable; so seemingly impossible to do anything about. but this guy found a way to really put himself out there in a politically poignant yet very Christ-like manner, and i found it nothing short of inspirational.

-to celebrate the end of 5 straight weeks of second semester exams, 5 of my 33 favorite classmates and i took a 3 day trip to the ancient nabeatan city of petra, in jordan! it was a really enjoyable time. we hiked for an entire day around the expansive site, which includes much more than the infamous treasury (of indiana jones fame). the place is huge, and the rugged mountainous vistas from such locales as "the end of the world" unbelievable! we also went to little petra the next day before heading home through aqaba and eilat on the red sea. turns out you can discreetly sneak into the eilat hilton's glamorous pool area, which turned out to be quite relaxing!

spring break scandinavian style!

pesach (passover, i.e. spring break - in april) provided a good opportunity to get out of israel and forget about being a medical student for a couple days. my initial well-planned plan was to make my way to afghanistan (for serious!). i have a friend who lives in kabul, had a place to stay, and was two clicks away from some cheap airline tickets. unfortunately however, they decided to reject my visa application. maybe it was for the best though, as the taliban decided to mount a sustained attack on kabul right around the time i would have showed up.

instead, i chose to head for another exotic destination: scandinavia! on the way up i had what was initially to be a 24 hour layover in prague, czech republic. what an amazing city! some tasty bratwursts and beer, unbelievable views from tops of towers, a colorful wall named after john lennon, an amazing castle, some fascinating jewish history, etc.! indeed, it was so epic that i unfortunately missed my connecting flight (also because my alarm clock didn't work). after a few panicked hours under the impression that my tardiness was going to be the worst financial mistake of my life, an empathetic airline manager was able to hack into the computer system and salvage the situation and i was able to continue to copenhagen, denmark.

at this point plans (which had involved going to norway) were things of the past, so i randomly hopped on a train across the oresund bridge (one of the longest in the world) and then up to gothenburg, sweden (pronounced - get this: yo-tee-boor-ee)! i learned that it is the home of volvo and unequivocally the friendliest city in sweden! i then continued to a nice little city in central sweden called orebro, where my friend barrett lives. barrett is amazing; he was the program assistant when i studied abroad in egypt (before which he had taught himself fluent arabic), after which he got married to a nice swedish lady and has since learned perfect, accent-free swedish. we went to a house on a secluded lake for the weekend with a bunch of their friends who had names like hilda and johan and mats - it was rather enjoyable! there was an easter egg hunt, some really tasty food, and a late night bros only sauna session which of course had to involve dips in the 1 degree lake! they taught me a phrase in swedish which i used repeatedly; i was able to teach them one english word (they already knew all the rest). we also got to go to barrett's church on easter morning which surprising was very similar to a typical church in small town north america, except that in sweden they do gourmet espresso in delicate china instead of folgers in styrofoam cups. we also got to go to some really friendly (physician!) inlaw's architecturally avant-garde home for lunch! all in all it was an immensely enjoyable and enlightening couple of days; thanks barrett!

i then took a train to stockholm for a few hours, where i browsed through about 2 dozen h&m stores (that's where it started!) and sauntered along some picturesque waterfront walkways. then took another train south back to copenhagen. initially the plan was to also visit my friend karin who lived in the south of sweden, but she decided to move back to america. karin, you'll be pleased to know that i still had a good time! my new friends from northern sweden made sure that i understood that people from southern sweden are unintelligible to them, and that the southerner's habit of flying a flag that is a hybrid of the swedish and danish flags is kinda insulting to them. its strangely relieving to know that even scandinavians have divisions!

i got to spend a day in the bicycling capital of the world, copenhagen! after a lot of wandering, i chanced upon a famously overrated mermaid statue which was gifted to the city by the founder of the heineken company. just north is a more modern version with substantially larger breasts. just north of that is a "genetically modified" mermaid. it'll be interesting to see what they'll build just north of that!

i also went to a crazy community in copenhagen called christiania . the danes are known for being very straight-laced and obsessed with rules, so the "free town" of christiania developed as something of a cultural antidote to that. its a car-free community of continually high, dread-locked hippies who live in slum-like dwellings on an island in the middle of copenhagen. some highlights: a place where you can leave your rancid tie-die t-shirt and take another one that someone else left, a horse farm run by children, their own flag, their own currency, barrels of burning stuff that you can huddle around for warmth, and replicas of buddhist temples. main street is known as the "green light district", and there are just 3 rules: 1. "have fun"; 2. "no running - it causes panic"; and 3. "no photos - selling hash is still illegal". quite the place.

on the way home i had another day in prague. my last few few hours in europe were spent enjoying cheap food and bottomless coffee at ikea with what must have been a substantial proportion of prague's homeless population. then it was back to reality and the semester's final exams!