savoy096

Last weekend, I woke up on a beach. Despite it being only 6 am and having wind-tangled hair and a mouth full of sand, it was magnificent. It’s a constant struggle to find a balance between fun and learning, to fight the nagging voice telling me to stay cooped up studying while also trying to squeeze in time to get my suntan/burn on while sitting, eating, dancing, swimming (and competitively winning at card games) amongst friends and Israelis at sunset on the Mediterranean. We are living in this beautiful country, after all, and when the opportunity arises to go camping on a beach or diving off a cliff or snorkeling in the Red Sea, we must seize it (YOLO, amiright?). So, we packed our things and headed to Beit Yanai, a beach 30 minutes north of Tel Aviv, and did just that. It was a glorious way to cap off the weekend after an equally satisfying visit to Tel Aviv.  As part of our first year Global Health course, we have been split up into pairs and assigned various clinical placement...

I was going to start this blog post with a pun about rockets, but, when google failed me and that plan imploded (har har), I decided instead to write an ode to the craziness of this past August. A slow start to the school year meant that, while our friends across the ocean were tucking into neatly pressed white coats and embarking on their first few weeks of medical school, we were holed up in classrooms doubling as shelters (not to mention meeting the neighbours in the middle of the night wearing nothing but a towel…), cramming 5 weeks’ worth of Emergency Medicine and Hebrew lessons into 5 days while sirens occasionally blared in the background to remind us of the current state of affairs. It also meant an ensuing scramble to set up apartments and phone lines as things began to settle, exposing us to the balagan of Israeli culture, starting at the grocery store, where we stood in something that sort of resembled a line, wondering whether we were actually buying yogurt or sour cream an...