The World Comes to New York

It's been a pretty international few weeks around here:

Had Afghan food with my friend Gabe from Hopkins.  He was in Afghanistan at the same time I was in Iraq, so we caught up on our experiences.  Now he works on an HIV vaccine study.  Like other studies, it's not been found to be protective against HIV; in fact it has been found to slightly increase the chances of contracting HIV.  He's in the unenviable position of contacting study participants and sharing this information, a challenging job to say the least.

Met up with my friend Howard, also from Hopkins, who was in town to see his Canadian friends.  We started with Belgian food, but ended up at the amazing pizza place Artichoke in the East Village.

Saw the Verdi's Il Trovatore, based on a Spanish story, sung in Italian (with those cool English subtitles in the rail in front of every seat!) at the Metropolitan Opera with my friend (and backup doula) Hana.

 

The seats were high.  Really high.  Like parallel with the chandelier high.  But it was still cool.

Eskimo got a present from Hong Kong, via my roommate Jaime who was there for work.

Saw my friends Gann and Dale, who are just back from 7 years in Uganda (sound even better than 7 years in Tibet), where they were kind enough to host me not once but twice.  They were in town to speak to country missions on or about to be on the Security Council about the situation in northern Uganda.  The organization they were working with, Mennonite Central Committee, does peace-building work in this region, so they've got a lot of expertise!  I was able to grab them away to have breakfast at the American classic, Tick-Tock Diner, by Penn Station.

And then some good old just plain American.
Enjoyed fall in my neighborhood park.

Went to a pie party.  Made an apple-raspberry pie with fall leaves top crust.

Babysat for a little boy whose mother I was a doula for way back in March.  He's grown!

Have been running a lot, trying to see everything New York has to see and enjoy the great fall weather.  This run is my favorite, especially down in Battery Park when you can see Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty.


Accompanied a (morbidly obese) patient to a transesophageal echocardiogram of his heart, where I saw one of the coolest views of the beating heart yet.