Ahh, sweet summer time. I finished my 3rd year of medical school which means I have 4 weeks of vacation before I start back up for my last year before I graduate.

So where am I going to travel to vacation? Yep, you got it right, Iowa! Iowa???

It may seem the unlikeliest of places to travel to, since Iowa in the summer  is probably hotter and more humid than a Windsor summer. But Iowa is where I actually lived for 2 years (I can’t believe it myself sometimes) when I first started medical school. It’s also the state where I met my girlfriend. She’s now working in Iowa City and will be living there for a few more months.

So this summer, I’ll be mostly in Iowa to be with her, and driving back to Windsor if I need to.

The photo above shows you what Iowa looks like. Yep, your typical farmland you probably imagined in your head. Lots of farm land, corn, and pig farms.

But they do get some cool things going on. Last weekend I went with my girlfriend and her friends to the Burlington Steamboat Festival in Burlington, IA.  We were most excited to see a country band perform, the Zac Brown Band. I actually enjoy their stuff, so I was actually as excited as she was.

The concert was held in an outdoor auditorium, along the shores of the Mississippi River. It was a great performance — my favourite parts were some of the behind-the-scenes videos they would show of the band as they toured the country. They were really into suporting the troops overseas, and some of the coolest clips were of the band performing at a military base overseas.

He was sponsoring a program called Letters For Lyrics where you would write a letter to a soldier, and it would be delivered to them while they were away on service. In return, we would get a nice CD to listen to.

I reflected a bit on the importance of the work the troops do. While you may agree or disagree with the involvement of North American troops fighting overseas currently, I personally feel thankful for our freedom that we have here — which would not have been possible by soldiers who fought wars, past and present.

Thinking about it, I would not have been there if we didn’t live in a ‘free’ country — whether Canada or America. I was standing there, in the heart of the USA, along the shores of the Mississipi, me — born in Canada, son of two Chinese immigrants — holding hands and enjoying a cloudless, warm, evening at a concert with my American girlfriend from Wisconsin. Pretty amazing.

Check out their video below!

This entry was posted on Monday, June 21st, 2010 at 5:03 pm and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.