anna in med school

Almost 99% of fetuses with Turner’s Syndrome (females with only one X chromosome) spontaneously abort in the first trimester, in fact, Turner’s is one of the most frequent chromosome aberrations found in early spontaneous abortions.  Yet, especially when compared with other chromosome abnormalities, the effects of Turner’s are fairly mild.

Also, the fact that imprinting is, in fact, a thing and not just something made up by the Twilight saga…weird.  That the human body can somehow sense which somatic genes come from which parent, and that a microdeletion in the one inherited from the father rather than the mother would have such drastically different effects (Prader-Willi vs. Angelman), is totally freaky/fascinating.

And I, at the ripe old age of 26 (who am I kidding, I’ll be 27 in December–that’s practically late twenties!  please note sarcasm), am over 25% more likely to be carrying around eggs with chromosome abnormalities than I was just five years ago.  Jesus.

Montreal!  It was spectacular–the neighborhoods, the cafes, the food, the parks, the people.  And the residents would respond to me in French, to John in English without batting an eye.

We stayed the first night at a the somewhat unusual but altogether charming Petit Prince B&B.

Then we spent two nights at Isabelle and JP’s beautiful flat in the Plateau.  For those of you who haven’t tried airbnb, John and I cannot recommend it more highly–it’s probably my new favorite website.  We might never stay in a hotel again–what’s the point?  We got to stay in a killer apartment (with a gorgeous back porch, see below) in our favorite neighborhood in Montreal with way more floor space and character than any hotel.  And we saved a few bucks because a) the apartment was more affordable than any hotel room, and 2) we could cook our meals at home and then just go out for coffee, drinks, and jazz.

We must have had coffee or espresso at least 4-7 times a day–there were so many fun places to try, including Cafe Myriade (left) and Juliette et Chocolate (right–extra-dark Tanzanian hot chocolate…yum!):

We just loved exploring the city, we literally walked everywhere:

Although it was hard to keep John off the bixis:

Thanks to Betsy’s suggestion, we had the best soup in the world at Chez Jose, and then perused both Marche Atwater and Marche Jean Talon for local produce (the latter was better!)–we even managed to cross the Canadian-US border with a few stowaways (though I’m still mourning the loss of the tomato and peppers we had to hand over to authorities):

And these are just the highlights–we consumed way more coffee and alcohol than I care to document publicly.

Stay tuned for our detour to Lincoln, Vermont!