Visiting home and traveling..my summer break before starting the second year of medical school by blogger of the month Maia Reiley

After spending a few days with friends in New York, I flew home to Maine, and immediately started preparing for the next leg of the very exciting journey that medical school is turning out to be. Visiting home is one of the wonderful things about traveling and living in a foreign country, and the result of habituating to a new country is a sort of reverse culture shock upon reentry. JFK airport greeted the newly deplaned arrivals from Israel with several well marked lines to stand in, depending on country of citizenship. The airport attendants loudly, enthusiastically, and repeatedly made sure that everybody knew which line to stand in, how to open their passports to the proper page, and how to present their customs ticket. While efficient, the process seemed insulting. After nearly a year of pushing and shoving and generally fending for myself to achieve anything from getting on a bus to opening a bank account, going through American passport control felt very foreign. 

Other experiences proved to be more welcoming in their simplicity. I could plug my computer straight into the outlet, instead of playing a balancing game with the outlet, plug converter and power cord. I could understand everything being said around, about, or to me. It is very nice to be able to have a conversation with instead of getting the general gist of questions and either smiling and nodding and saying thank you, or smiling and shaking my head and saying no thank you.

My few days in the city of well organized lines have been followed up with a refreshing stop in the land of no lines at all, which can also be called the land of nearly no people, or, in google-able terms, Brooklin, Maine. My family just calls it home, though.

The next stop will be Iquitos, Peru. One of the perks of attending MSIH is the likelihood of meeting other students who not only want to do the same things as you in their free time, but who will also make a plan do these things and follow it through. The current thing is a summer internship in a city off the Amazon that, apparently, can be reached by plane or boat, but not by road. Because I don't particularly enjoy cars or driving, this should be great. I wonder what the local practice is for standing in lines, though. 

Saying "Good-bye" to Israel and the 1st Year of medical school...until August by blogger of the month Maia Reiley

I had thought that the days after our exam would be a leisurely time to go to the pool, read, eat lots of falafel and hummus, tie up loose ends, and pack a few things to take back to the US. Instead, it has been a hectic couple of days trying to get the apartment squared away so that we can move out in August, running around to the clinic and pharmacy, squeezing in last minute visits to the people with whom I've grown close over the last ten months and generally feeling guilty about any time not spent preparing for something else. Hectic is not to say bad, though. I finally have my very confusing vaccination history figured out, I took a practice mefloquin pill to make sure that malaria prophylaxis won't make me hallucinate, I can (guiltily) leave the rest of the apartment logistics to my roommates, and I took a lovely walk to the outskirts of Beer Sheva with the mother and daughters of a family I've gotten to know. The northern part of Beer Sheva is on an incline, so if you walk up past the neighborhood of Ramot Bet, you can look out across the desert landscape and appreciate the uniqueness of the city. There is also a hill to hike up, but the children had school the next day, and it would have taken too long. Sorry for the lack of picture; you'll have to come see it for yourself before the mayor's aggressive urbanization overtakes the view.

I'm waiting for my flight to New York to leave now. Today is my first time departing from Ben Gurion airport, and what an experience it is. Waiting in line to check in, I noticed some fun cross-cultural interactions, like a returning New Yorker yelling at an old lady for trying to crowd him in line. I'm not sure how long he's been in the country. Maybe he never got off the tour bus if he hasn't figured out that, in Israel, there is nothing abnormal about people fighting to get ahead in line.

A word to the wise: if you are leaving on a busy Thursday and you have visa stamps from any of the countries surrounding Israel, you may want to show up even more than three hours ahead of time. I suspected there would be delays as soon as the young man checking my passport and boarding pass said “so, tell me about Egypt.” Rather than joining a general line for security, the airport attendants check the sticker on your passport and direct you to a specialized security line. Although there were only about fifteen people ahead of me (“how efficient, this will go quickly,” I thought), due to the extremely scrupulous inspection of every carry-on item, this turned out to take the better part of two hours. Luckily, there was no reason to detain me, so I made it through passport control and got to my gate a full ten minutes before the scheduled boarding time. Sadly, though, this means that I don't have the chance to hang out by the fountain in the center of the airport and send lots of “thank you” emails and irritating “guess what completely mundane thing just happened, which I find suddenly fascinating because I'm stuck in the airport” texts to people.

Oh well, with that, I must say good-bye to Israel and my first year of medical school. I'll be back in August for more adventures.