Thus Beginneth the National Tour

Ever noticed that all airports seem to be decorated with an airplane theme? It's as though they're worried you'll take a mighty blow to the head and wake up with amnesia, wondering where you are then realize there are airplanes ad nauseum on the carpet, walls, ceiling, artwork, and thus be cured of your memory loss. That's why it's always refreshing to see anything other than planes when traipsing along toward baggage claim . Like this classy thing here:

I'll be doing a lot of flying over the next three months for ophthalmology interviews. I'm trying to think of it as a fantastic national tour. Boston! Denver! San Francisco! Salt Lake! Tucson! Atlanta! Soon I'll be intimately familiar with all of their 2-star bargain hotels!

I just got back from Baltimore, MD, where I did my first ophthalmology interview at Johns Hopkins. It's one of the best programs in the country, nestled in one of the freakiest cities in the country. According to one source, you are statistically more likely to be shot in Baltimore than in the green zone of Baghdad. Yowch. Anyway, in the course of making my way from airport to city light-rail to subway to hospital, I got lost in that glorious wasteland. I eventually found myself on a street corner with this study in contrast:

On one side, there was this inscribed bench with gilded letters and golden dreams.

On the other side, there was this stretch of tenement row-houses.

Ultimately, I decided to ignore the shiny bench propaganda and hustle away from there, wondering if I'd be mugged as a reward for having used my camera in public.

Overnight, I stayed in a dorm room provided on campus, listening to the sirens continuously wailing outside, watching the little spiders skitter across the walls and bedspread, and counting the minutes until my flight home. The kicker is that the ophtho program there is very very very good, which makes up for a multitude of sirens and spiders.

As one last memorial to the trip, here's pictoral evidence of 1 second in Baltimore during which I was neither mugged, robbed, mobbed, or terrorized. The sun was shining, the squirrels were chomping, and the railway connection mercifully came to take me away.