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.
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