Update, update

I'm still here, I swear!
Update on my busy life:
(1) Med school is good. Histology sucks. I start anatomy tomorrow!
(2) Went to San Diego to visit my sister Katherine this weekend. Also saw some MSTP friends who came down also. Made a lame attempt at partying, and just ended up ordering 5 orders of carne asada fries and eating them late at night (not just me, all of us!).
(3) Going back home (to NorCal) next weekend, for the holiday.

I will post pictures sometime, but Kristin and I haven't gotten a couch yet, and are embarrassed by our bare living room. I'm also incredibly lazy.

School has started...

Just got through my first day of (real) medical school. The past week has been orientation, just a bunch of administrative stuff and explanations. Today I had my first real lecture, which was mostly review, but still interesting.
Matt was visiting the past few days (I still haven't found my camera so no pictures there). He was basically only here for one and a half days, but we crammed in a lot of stuff--we went to a med school event at a bar, walked in Santa Monica, went to Venice Beach, walked around Westwood, etc. Overall a great weekend, although now I think I'm sick or have terrible allergies (hopefully the former).
I'm still settling in (and haven't found my camera), but when I have time (ha ha) I'll post pictures of my beautiful apartment in Westwood, my awesome roommate, and my classmates. I think I'm going to like med school :-).

I'm in LA!

And I finally got my internet working. I've spent the past few days buying furniture, unpacking, and stocking up my apartment. I'll post pictures once I get everything arranged satisfactorily! I love Westwood though, and can't wait until classes start on Monday. I'm going to San Diego with my parents tomorrow, and should be back on Sunday. More after my life is less hectic!

Dum Dums

Where can you buy Dum Dums? According to the Dum Dum website, they have them at Safeway but I went to two Safeways today and neither had them. Anyone know?

Road trip part I: Driving, West Yellowstone, and some of Yellowstone

I'm finally getting my life in order! I finally did my laundry and started packing, so hopefully I'll be ready for my move on Wednesday.
Anyways, I'm trying to post up some of the best pictures from my trip in chronological order. We spent the first two days driving across California, Nevada, and some of Idaho. Unfortunately I didn't take any pictures of Elko, Nevada, where we spent our first night. Elko was pretty weird--a little town full of hotels, small casinos, and Basque restaurants. Apparently they have an annual Basque festival there. We actually ate at one of the Basque restaurants on our way back, but it was mostly American food and omelettes. In Idaho we crossed the Snake River (for the first of about 10 times--that thing crossed the freeway so many times!) on this really cool historical bridge that we wanted to take pictures of, so Matt actually made a U-turn on the freeway. Luckily we were on a tiny freeway in Idaho with no one else, so this wasn't actually dangerous. We were expecting the river to be shallow, but it was in this crazy ravine that looks sort of lame in the picture. It was actually quite high (hence the fence preventing people from climbing down).


Other than the river, Idaho was pretty boring, just lots of flat farmland. When we got to Montana, the terrain changed a lot, and we saw more animals. Right away, we saw two pronghorn antelope, and at our motel in West Yellowstone, we saw a yellow bellied marmot! We didn't know what it was at the time, but we took pictures and looked it up online. It was sitting in the garden of the lady who owned the motel (she lived in the back), and we didn't know if it was her pet, or was wild. It wasn't afraid of people.


We spent two nights in West Yellowstone and one night camping in the park. Probably the coolest part of the sightseeing we did was on the first day, when we hiked around a bunch of geysers and pools. We were really lucky and saw the Grand Geyser go off, which is relatively unpredictable and only goes off twice a day. It shot water up about 200 feet!


My favorite thing was the Emerald Pool, which was a hot spring that was a neat shade of green.


There were also a ton of these funny signs warning people to stay on the paths, since the area around the hot springs were geothermally active. The best part isn't the kid getting his feet burned, but the woman to the left (his mother?) who's upset about it. Every time I saw this sign I wanted to laugh.


That's all for now! I'll post more Yellowstone pictures later!

Yes, I really did go to Yellowstone

I'm back from my trip! I got back early yesterday evening (just in time to watch a show on pygmy elephants! neat!). Today I've just been doing crap like unpacking, cleaning, and buying things for my move down to LA. I have a ton of pictures from the trip, but here are just a few to prove that I actually left, and wasn't just hiding out at the mall, hehe.

This was our "welcome" to the park--a huge buffalo on the road! The traffic had stopped a few miles into the park on our first day there, and as we were wondering what was going on, we saw this guy walking up the road. He was going really slowly and didn't seem to notice the long line of cars following him.


This is me in front of one of the pretty pools that were all over Yellowstone. They were a mix of blues and oranges and browns, and some were steaming or bubbling.


Finally, this is a funny geyser that was squirting right onto the walkway. We happened to pass by when it was going off, and everyone got really wet. The weird thing was, even though the air coming out of the geyser was really hot, the water was freezing cold. It was a really hot day so it felt nice, though.


That's all the pictures I'm going to post for now, but I'll definitely try to get more up later. We took a million pictures of different pools and everything, so I'm going to have to sort through them all.

Still on my trip

I'm on the last leg of my Yellowstone road trip. In the past week or so, Matt and I have driven across Nevada and part of Idaho, visited Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks, and driven to Salt Lake City. I'm still in Salt Lake City right now, but we're leaving in a few hours to hopefully spend the night in Reno, then come back home early afternoon on Sunday. I have some great pictures, which I'll hopefully upload when I get back.