Oral Cancer Walk

Every year, Penn Dental hosts an Oral Cancer Walk to increase awareness, raise money and provide oral cancer screenings. This year we raised over 25,000 dollars. We also had the help of many different sponsors from Turkey Hill (look at all that tea!) to City Tap House who provided breakfast for all the volunteers and runners and walkers!

One of the D1s, Jin, made this amazing video about the day! I hope you enjoy it! You get to hear from one of my favorite professors here at Penn, Dr. Sollecito!

Last day of vacay

We were very sad on our last day of vacation but I recorded a video of the sunset! Enjoy!

Day 7

On Day 7 we had our engagement photo shoot and then headed off to Waikiki beach!
Our engagement photos were so much fun! Here was one of the photos from our experience:

Fun fact: there are only 39 Harry Winston salons in the world and ended up visiting the one at Waikiki! It was really funny when a couple walked past us while we were taking a picture and the woman jokingly told Andrew to go buy me a diamond! I quite enjoyed that since he had just asked me to marry him!

Our walk along Waikiki:

We also stopped by the aquarium to see the jellyfish, some seahorses and the seal:

Lastly, we ended with dinner at House without a key and had the chance to watch some live performances!

Nitrogenie

At the Ala Moana shopping center, we discovered this place called Nitrogenie that serves liquid nitrogen ice cream! Cue inner nerd squeal! Nitrogenie is an Indonesia based company that recently opened in the states! They constantly have cool and unique flavors like roasted coconut cream and white balsamic strawberries!

They have liquid nitrogen tanks that deliver liquid nitrogen straight to the mixer to guarantee that your ice cream is nice and frozen right when it gets to you!

Here’s a video of what the process looks like:

We decided to try the mango and summer flavor. I loved how they serve the ice cream! Each flavor has a unique design. For instance the mango was shaped like a fresh cut mango half. The nutella cornucopia was topped with a little cone filled with nutella.

The ice cream tastes like regular ice cream but we enjoyed our experience of watching them make it! We also loved that it transported us back to our childhood days of getting liquid nitrogen ice cream demonstrations!

Diwali Night

Last Friday night, the Indian Student Dental Association hosted Diwali night at Houston Hall. It was tons of fun with good food from Sitar, and amazing dancing from our Brown Sugar Dance group!
  With one of the MCs:
  Here to support our fave dancer, Sejal!  The food ❤
  Our D2 class had some amazing representation!  Sej looked absolutely gorgeous!!!
I’m not sure why the video was blurry but you can check it out here:

The Lava Scanner

This week in GRD we got a chance to play around with the LAVA scanner which takes a digital impression of a patient’s arches and converts them into a 3D model on the computer. Though it takes a while to take a full scan of the arch, it definitely isn’t as messy as alginate.
Here’s how you take the impression in the mouth:

And this is what shows up on the screen! It actually looks so cool that it looks fake!

And this is the final result:

It actually ended up being more difficult than I thought. The scanner shines really bright LEDs to capture the image so ideally you want to look at the screen and not at the flashing lights. It gets a little difficult trying to redirect the scanner while looking at the screen!

Of course provisional panda also got a scan!

Toronto International Film Festival

Something that Cecilia and I did that was super cool was to go see a movie that was part of the Toronto International Film Festival. We went to watch Colonia, featuring Emma Watson.

I didn’t really know what the movie was about (Cecilia had mentioned something about it being political thriller) so I honestly had no idea what to expect but I actually ended up really enjoying it.

Basically the movie was about a couple who gets accidentally sucked up into the middle of a political situation in Argentina. It focuses on Colonia Dignidad, a religious sect that has very strong Nazist/fascist influences. I thought it was really cool because this was something that I learned about back when I was an Italian major. It was definitely haunting but it was a fabulous movie!!!

Here’s the trailer if you’re interested!

Fun Home

While we were in New York, Cecilia and I decided to go see the musical Fun Home before we left. Fun Home recently won Best Musical along with 4 other Tony awards. It’s based on the graphic novel by Alison Bechdel and the story covers her life as she tries to come to terms with her homosexuality, her childhood helping with the funeral home and her father’s suicide. I read Bechdel’s graphic novel back second year of undergrad and really enjoyed it. Back then it felt strange reading about her story in graphic novel form but then it came out as a musical and that blew my mind some more.

I absolutely loved this musical. I thought it was really well written and stayed close to my interpretation and understanding of her story. The music was superb and I loved that it played with another unconventional technique by using an arena stage. (This is when the audience forms a complete circle around the stage instead of having a thrust stage where the audience is only on three sides. It creates more difficulty in terms of forming a stage picture since you need to have clear sight lines all the time.) I DEFINITELY recommend going to watch it.

Cecilia and I also took a picture with Sydney Lucas who portrays young Alison.

And here’s their Tony Award Performance:

Esperanza Spalding

Liz and I went to see Esperanza Spalding when she was here in Philly and it was absolutely fantastic. She’s an amazing singer and wicked bassist.  Her music was very different from what she usually plays but it was a very interesting performance.

Her outfit was pretty rad too!

    

This is what her normal sound is like:

And this is what her performance in Philly was:

Pretty different huh?

QPenn Drag Show

Last Friday night, some of my classmates and I went to the QPenn drag show to support our friends and it was absolutely FANTASTIC.
        We had a ton of fun watching the performances but I like to think Kimora stole the show when she sang Happy Birthday (to Mariah Carey) cause it was seriously on point.