Elevate the feet

A goofy Elliott.

Oy, did we walk today!  


Food and wine cornucope (new verb), tourists from all ends of the Earth wander like rhumbas (TM), sun abounds, history pounces.  


We have been walking Rome like crazy -- I think Elliott and I put in 8 miles today on top of my 3-mile morning run along the Tiber -- and just got back to the apartment for some foot elevation.  Bathing E's trying out the jacuzzi as we speak and I'm sipping inexpensive but tasty local table wine.  We have dinner reservations tonight in a couple hours and then grab a train in the morning up to Orvieto where our villa awaits.  Rome is CROW-ded but fun.  We saw the Pope, his escape palace -- Castel San Angela -- down the road (where Hadrien is buried), the Trevi fountain, the Pantheon (just the outside as we were poopered out), and the incredibly well-stocked and maintained Etruscan museum (which was awesome; my favorite item may have been the 2300-year-old porcupine-shaped vinegar vessel).  

A pixellated Pope.

My cousin Eli, who is in first grade, has sent my mom to Italy with Flat Stanley, to see what he could see, to see what he could see.  Stanley really got in the spirit of things this morning at St. Peter's Square.

Yesterday I was too tired to blog so here are some thoughts and pics:

I tell you, readers, I sobbed yesterday into the bosoms of two of the people I love most, crying with sadness for the lost potential of young Ethiopians, many of the brightest of whom use their English skills to scam well-meaning visitors into giving them a few extra birr because it's by far the best gig in town.  I was crying with the feeling of defeat that floored me like the cross of 1-2 punch after the set-up jab of the home-coming warmth of clean air, shod citizens, well-fed children, a paved running trail along the Tiber, and my mother's loving embrace.  A short visit to a place that is so badly hurting is a recipe for feeling ineffective and, at the end of a decade-long training road built of heart-felt motives and sometimes unpleasant hard work, that was (nope: "is") a hard pill to swallow.  What I believe is not that I am ineffective as a teacher or doctor or even that I'm ineffective as a teacher-doctor in a big, poor hospital serving the under-served of a country plagued by diseases I rarely see at home, but that the ways I can be helpful in similar settings and which will be sufficiently satisfying to me will involve much longer stays allowing for deeper relationship-building with colleagues and time to see some fruits of labors, and more specific goals (eg. teaching advanced cardiac life support to a class of interns or helping a faculty group --at their request-- to build a curriculum for their residency).  This trip was the continuation of a reconnaissance mission in aid of building a long-term, thoughtful relationship between Swedish Family Medicine and Gondar Internal Medicine Residency, and Sonal and I were helpful --both by being the generous and socially caring people we are and by stretching daily our boundaries of comfort to learn from and teach the residents and house officer staff there.  Whether this felt successful on a day-to-day basis or not, I do think the sentiment of our intentions and efforts was positive.  Enough for tonight; photo time.

Out for a pre-dinner stroll yesterday with mi mama at Bernini's Fontana de Quatro Fuomi (rivers), in Piazza Navonna just a few blocks from our appartamento:  

We went out for wonderful, flat-crusted but scoop-edged pizza at Dar Poeta (recommended by the New York Times), just across Ponte Sisto from our apartment.  One pizza had raw salmon and zucchini flowers and another sausage, chili powder, garlic, and mozzarella.  I love me some enjera but our poor little gastrointestinal tracts are desperately relieved to have familiar and varied foods:

Post-dinner digestive walk home on Ponto Sisto, a pedestrian bridge over the Tiber (Tivere) where, tonight, there were three sets of musicians busking on each third of the cobbled bridge:

Tomorrow to the countryside...

Good night, my dears!