General weirdness

One of the truly surreal moments on our honeymoon was visiting the modern exhibit at the chateau at Chambord--easily the most impressive of the chateaus we visited on our trip (there is a small picture below). The chateau itself was a little different than the others in that it was built from scratch to be simply a sumptuous palace--that is, it wasn't built to be the center of a city, it was never a fortress--it's really in the middle of nowhere. The King (Francois I) wanted to create the most impressive chateau as a monument to his reign.

Anyway, it's huge, and dramatic...and there are more rooms than they know what to do with. There's a huge portion of the castle that is in fact blocked off--I'm not sure what's in there. But there is also a section which uses the great open space of the castle as a showcase for modern art. A lot of it (like the piece of bizarro art shown on the left) deals with hunting and nature, as one of the reasons this site was chosen for Chambord is its proximity to good hunting areas, for which Francois had a great passion. It's pretty strange to see some of this very modern art in the context of a very old castle (much older than anything in the U.S., anyways).

I posted more pictures of our honeymoon on Snapfish.com. Contact me at nathanhellman@yahoo.com if you would like to see them but can't figure out how...

Although it's a bummer to back at work after essentially one month of vacation/elective, I'm enjoying the start of my current rotation. I'm the "Medicine Consult" resident for two weeks--basically, when patients are on a different service (e.g., Surgery, Orthopedics, Podiatry, etc.) and they need to have the opinion of somebody from Internal Medicine they call on me. Should be fun!