Seattle and Vancouver

Hey!

You would think that I would have more time to blog during the summer, and yet I still have so much to catch you guys up on. Just as a brief summary I would describe my summer so far as relaxing. When my summer first started I was simply spending time with my friends and doing a little studying for the MCAT. My time became slightly less free as I now have a job tutoring! The tutoring gig actually started about the end of June and has been pretty successful so far...I hope. I might go into more detail in a later post, but basically I am tutoring a rising high school freshman boy in English. Then with the start of July, I have started volunteering at a local hospital. Depending on my experiences at the hospital, I might recap my volunteering later as well, but I love the feeling of helping other people feel better. I know that I'm not actually curing any ailment that these patients have and in no way do I expect to, but seeing these patients and the hope they have really encourages me about my career choice.

Now onto the reason for this post. Recently my family and I went on vacation to Seattle and Vancouver. Now you might be wondering why we would go there for vacation during the summer as that's the reaction I received from a lot of my friends, but I'm really glad we went. We started our trip in Vancouver, and boy was I in for a surprise. One of my close friends is Canadian and my group of friends and I love to make fun of her about how Canada doesn't exist. We actually refer to Canada as Canadialand because it's fictional! When I got to Canada I was so ready to have my jokes proven wrong. And to my surprise those jokes actually seemed correct. Canada appeared to be no different than any other part of the US. I mean sure there were Canadian flags everywhere and they call the bathroom the washroom, but really the stores, cars, and customs were the same. What was even more surprising was that Canada appeared to be a mix of Hong Kong and the US. Our hotel was just outside of the city of Vancouver, and yet it was like we were in the middle of China. Of course we might have just been in the Chinatown of that city, but even in downtown Vancouver there were a lot of Asians. Now I've been to China before and I can handle the Chinese atmosphere, but it was still a shock. I have nothing against Canadians and they have a lot of great things going for them, especially their Canadian pride, but Vancouver just wasn't really for me.

Seattle on the other hand...now that's an amazing city. Ever since college, I've truly realized how much of a suburban person I am. But Seattle made me reconsider my thoughts about not wanting to live in a big city. Seattle was the first city I've been in that was really clean and had any type of landscape that you could ever want. Seattle is a port city and so there's the ocean on one side with beaches, snow-topped mountains only two hours away, open farmland, and a lake. Seattle gets a lot of tourism business and I believe that tourists supply a large part of the revenue that helps Seattle businesses run, but that doesn't seem to hurt the city in any way. A lot of my friends couldn't understand why I love Seattle so much mainly because they believe the city to be covered in rain for a large part of the year. And I don't doubt that, because our first day in Seattle it was raining on and off all day. But even with the constant rain, the city never felt humid, which is one of the worst things about living in the south. Sure the city may not be filled with as much sunshine as I would like, but I will trade the better part of a sun filled summer here in the south for 80 degree highs instead of the 105 degree weathers we've been having lately. In fact, the biggest shocker for me from the whole trip was the fact that in Mount Rainier I was in shorts and a t-shirt with a light jacket and standing on a mountain side covered with snow. I loved Seattle so much, that I am seriously considering University of Washington Medical School as my medical school of choice.

I hope to be writing to you guys soon about the other parts of my life here during the summer, but if I don't, and that's a big possibility given my track record, know that I'll be back soon!