2007 Year in Review

Hello everyone. I hope everyone is having a good holiday season... I will miss you at Hung's party, but it's for a good cause (skiing). I'm starting to get used to the hospitalist lifestyle... I'm averaging 10 days of vacation trips per month since the boards. Visiting Anu and Kara in March/April, for 3 weeks, along with Matt and Sarah, will help increase that average. And.. life is good because the Cubs signed Kosuke Fukudome from Japan today. I think his nickname should be "the F-bomb."

If anyone cares, here's my 2007 Year in Review, as it pertains to music. Enjoy, and I'll see you after x-mas..

best albums of the year:
1- The Arcade Fire "Neon Bible"
2- Radiohead "In Rainbows"
3- LCD Soundsystem "Sound of Silver"
4- Of Montreal "Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?"
5- Spoon "Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga"
6- Panda Bear "Person Pitch"
7- The Field "From Here We Go to Sublime"
8- The National "Boxer"
9- The Shins "Wincing the Night Away"
10- Andrew Bird "Armchair Apocrypha"


Honorable Mentions: Burial, Les Savy Fav, Iron & Wine, White Stripes, NewPornographers, Okkervil River, Sunset Rubdown, Besnard Lakes, Modest Mouse, Elliott Smith (posthumous), Animal Collective, Low, The Twilight Sad, The Clientele, Deerhoof

biggest disappointments:
Wilco, Bloc Party, Band of Horses, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, New Pornographers


show/set of year
1- Arcade Fire @ Coachella (like Radiohead in 2004, the best bands rise to the occasion, and this is why you attend the Coachella Festival. It's always fun to see 60,000 jaws dropped)
2- Wolf Parade @ Great American Music Hall (after their Fillmore show took my #1 spot for 2006. By far, the best up-and-coming band in rock today)
3- Jeff Tweedy @ Golden Gate Park (emphasizing songs from 1992-2002, helped me remember why I fell for Wilco and Uncle Tupelo)
4- Spoon @ Treasure Island Festival (so consistent, so tight.. never a bad show)
5- CSS @ Coachella (them singing the bitchy song "Paris Hilton," while we watched the actual Paris Hilton dance along to it on the side of the stage, was itself worth the price of admission)

honorable mention: TV on the Radio @ the Fillmore, Manu Chao @ Coachella

best opening set (anticipated)
My Brightest Diamond (their cover of Led Zeppelin's "No Quarter" was my transcendent moment of the year)

best opening set (never heard of the band prior to that evening)
The Most Serene Republic (I did a double-take and thought I was hearing the Broken Social Scene… it turns out they are label-mates and also from Toronto)


there you have it. Anyone interested in joining me at Coachella, 4/24--4/28/08? I'm getting a posse together for the weekend in Palm Springs..

Word up...

So Kara and I finally got internet at home, yeah! Things are well here in Africa but we are definitely missing the bay area and all of you guys! Spending some of our time in the clinic and some doing outreach, it is a good mix although we tend to drink a lot when we are gone for outreach (well, to be honest, we drink a lot all the time...and Kara doesn't think it is really that different from back home...). There isn't much to do here in the evenings. We have had a fair bit of time to travel and try to escape from Lesotho as much as possible on the weekends. Getting ice cream (chocolate dipped of course) is kind of a treat for us now...this is caramel dipped actually...

I had the chance to go to Kruger National Park and Mozambique, got to see some wildlife and also the ocean for the first time in a while. I think the elephant and rhino thought about charging us but luckily decided against it...

Also recently had vacation and went to India and got to see my folks who were there as well. Kara had an 80s party here in Maseru while I was gone. Here's a picture of our digs, not too bad at all!

And the usual celebrity sightings out here, Prince Harry came out to visit. I guess George Bush might when he does his HIV tour of sub-saharan Africa in January...

There have definitely been a lot of tragedies while we have been here and death is so incredibly commonplace. Fortunately most of the children in the clinic are actually doing well making it more worthwhile for the both of us. We both use skype now and would love to hear from you, my username is anukagrawal and Kara's is kara.dubray, we are 10 hours ahead of you guys still on the west coast.

Hope everyone is well...

Anu