America, Act II

Here's a question: After quitting your job, taking a break from med school, and spending all of 2005 traveling to some of the most beautiful, exotic, invigorating places in the world, places you've been fantasizing about for a lifetime, is it a bad thing if your favorite part of the whole year is the ten days you spend in America?

Act II
When we headed up to New Haven during our whirlwind race through America, we each had three goals--

Meg:

1. Meet with important Yale medical people to prepare residency application
2. Go for a run in East Rock Park
3. See all the med school people she's been missing for the last year

Rahul:

1. Watch as many movies as possibe in his one free night (thus giving Meg for "girl talk time", which basically means "talk about Rahul time")
2. Eat more pizza than anyone would think possible (thus obliterating the India-diarrhea weight loss he had achieved earlier in the year)
3. See all the med school people he's been missing for the last year (not that he's in med school, but at times, it kinda felt like it)

Who says that being unemployed for 8 months kills your ambition? We're happy to report that we achieved all of our goals. Meg sounded like Tom Waits (thanks to karaoke) for her big meetings but came out with some quality feedback from her profs, we actually motivated to run up a thousand feet or so to the top of the park, and her friends were awesome about clearing out time to hang with her (special kudos to Andie for flying out from Raleigh). Rahul hit the local multiplex for a Batman Begins/War of the Worlds double feature, went to three rival pizza joints (12 pieces total) in 4 hours, and got to feel the friend love as well.

We gotta say though, it was kinda weird being there for a couple days. Unlike New York, which has always been a crazy weekend destination for us, New Haven was Meg's home last year (and Rahul's second home), so it was a bit jarring to slip back into the world of real responsibilities (well, for Meg anyway) knowing that we'd head back to the developing world a week later.

And now for some random thoughts from Rahul:

• I know that Tom Cruise is all into Scientology and is prone to wiggin' out at random times but I like the dude mostly because no one looks cooler when he runs. I think it should be written in to all of his scripts that he gets one scene where he's running frantically and emoting at the same time. Actually I think that that's already happened--War of the Worlds (running away from aliens for 2 hours while trying to protect his daughter), Jerry Maguire (running through the airport so that he can tell Renee Zelwegger that she completes him), Vanilla Sky (running through Times Square so he can start screaming uncontrollably), Top Gun (running to his F-16 so that he can start blowing people up), Magnolia (running to his car so that he can have an unexpected musical interlude and then cry over his dying father), Born on the Fourth of July (oh, mmm, wheelchair, oops)
• New Haven may or may not be the "birthplace of pizza" as it likes to claim, but if you want to taste the best pizza available outside of Paramus, NJ, go to Modern A Pizzeria on State Street. It blows Pepe's and Bar's iconocastic mashed potato pizza out of the water.

Tomorrow, the third and final act-- in which Meg and Rahul fly to Oregon, eat meat for 5 straight days, help a friend get married, and dance the two-step while a guy named Wiley yodels.