Baltimore, MY

Baltimore, impressions: damp, dull - except for occasional oases of entertainment, neighborhoods chameleon-like, shifting in appearance every 4 blocks or so. Reminiscent of several other all-business, no-pleasure American cities I've been in, none of the quaint, D.C. charm spilling over the border.
Johns Hopkins, impressions: one of the more intimidating campuses I've been to; solid, uninteresting architecture, lots of construction, undergraduates scurrying to the library with the urgency that only pre-meds can muster (and they're all pre-meds).
Hotel: weird; long corridors reeking of paint, Chinese takeaway menus shoved under the door in the dead of night, flickering, idiosyncratic cable depositing picture onto random channels as and when it pleased.
Professors: altogether too smart, too obsessed with their research for my tastes (although I suppose that may be considered a good thing to most others). Many with ties to Duke: one Dr. Holland actually worked with Dr. Buhusi at Duke two years ago. Research: the whole spectrum of neuroscience topics - spatial learning, fMRI physics, ontogeny of birdsong, electric fish (from which neuronal activity can be measured from outside the animal. Repeated myself 6 times in 6 separate interviews, each time less coherent than the last (also with mounting desperation as I realized that what I'm interested in really doesn't have a whole lot to do with the research that's happening at the moment).
Grad students: close-knit, (artificially?) cheerful, rich - $20000 stipend for 9 months plus $7000 more if you teach a course - keen...if I may use the word.
Food: paid for. Mexican. Excellent guacamole. Mediocre sangria - not enough citrus taste in it.
Bakus still number one for sangria, IMHO.
Chances of getting in: slim to none

Caught, towards the end, in a frightening and dangerous storm, which nearly kept me stranded in Maryland for an extra day. This uncertain and itinerant lifestyle is wearing me down rather, and I really would like to just be in Beaufort, settled, even if only for 7.5 weeks (though I still don't know how I'm going to get there).

Books:
Tender is the Night - F. Scott Fitzgerald. Long in coming, really, considering how much I appreciated Gatsby way back in secondary school, but books like these tend to get backed up and glossed over in the list somehow.