Winding Spiral Case: Life This Week: Go-Karting, Chinatown, & Solstice

Summer in Edmonton is pretty great. The days are long, so work doesn't seem as all-encompassing, and there's tons to do in the city. Last weekend I made an impromptu visit to Saskatoon with my mom -- neither of us had been and it was perfect road trip weather. We really liked the city; I'll have to post about it soon. Here's a picture from an evening walk in Saskatoon's river valley -- and some other things I've appreciated lately:

land of the living skies

go-karting -- To welcome our new PGY-1 the residents in my program met up for lunch at Farrow, a neat little sandwich shop I've been wanting to try forever, then headed over to Fast Track for go-karting (so much fun!), and DQ for ice cream after. Best academic half day ever ;)

picnic

first time -- I need practice!

Powerpointing -- Instead of academic half days this month we're doing pediatric oncology presentations. They're videoconferenced with the residents in Calgary, so that's fun. Mine this week was on medulloblastoma.

I don't write a lot about radiation oncology on here, but this is what we spend half our days doing -- drawing coloured circles

Chinatown -- I've for whatever reason never walked around Edmonton's Chinatown, so I'm glad for the Groupon to Fuqing Lanzhou that this week inspired my mom and me to visit. Edmonton's is probably one of the seedier Chinatowns in western Canada, but the Asian grandparents perusing the grocers and eateries didn't seem perturbed. We picked up some interesting things (like coconut jam from the Philippines) from Lucky 97 supermarket then headed over to this little northern Chinese noodle shop for dinner.

hand-made wheat noodle beef soup and pork/cabbage dumplings -- good stuff

Solstice -- I also had a nice meal with new and old friends at Solstice, a seasonal farm-to-table type restaurant on 124 St. We shared ahi tuna, wild boar cheek, and chicken liver pate appies from their summer menu and I had smoked pork hock for a main. The food was all beautiful and delicious -- and we made up for the portion sizes with birthday cake later.

smoked pork hock -- summer succotash, polenta cake, pork skin, smoked crème fraiche, and spicy pepper glaze
(if restaurant faciness is proportional to the amount of menu vocab you have to look up, this place was faaancy)

welcome social -- I had a fun time helping out with our first resident social of the year on Friday. Engagement is something we've worked hard on on the residents' association, so it made me really happy that so many people came out. Fingers crossed we can keep this momentum going all year.