Rolling rolling rolling, diving diving diving

The trip from Copan Ruinas to La Ceiba SUCKS. majorly and seriously. I mean when they sell you a ticket telling you that it's a direct nonstop bus, then pick up and drop off every person in view and not in view and have tiny children literally almost sitting on your shoulder because it's so packed, when all you want to do is a)sleep and b)scream at the person that sold you the tickets, it's just plain uncool. 4 hours later and it's layover time. Fortunately for me, it happens to be SATURDAY of Semana Santa--i.e. everything is closed. what isn't closed, doesnt make coffee. Now at this point i'm REAAAAALLY cranky AND decaffeinated. And when i finally find a bucket of brew i have to dump it because it's too hot to drink and the bus is already trying to leave for Ceiba. GRRRRRR.

On to better things. 2 hour ferry to Roatan-kinda nice. pretty views, sunset all that. Oh, wait. sunset. Shit. That means (duh!) everything is closed and dark and i'm just hoping i find a place to stay and hopefully all the Semana Santanians have left on Sunday and uhm MAYBE i can even find a dive shop that's still open to book some diving (nope). No prob with the housing though, it even has a kitchen. But no hot water. And as of today the dorm is FULL. oh well, at least i'm diving.
Not super spectacular diving but at least i'm in the water and at $20/dive you really kind of have to take it as it comes, huh?

Vacation Round 2

El Salvador-Day 1.
s/p arriving at 8 pm and being threatened of bus robbings, not that buses were running at that hour, i finally make it to the hostel. And so what if nobody there wants to go out explore the town, and so what if the bed is reminiscent of a hammock in shape if not in purpose one beer in, one person out.

Day 2.
buses buses and more buses as I try to make it to the volcano climbing trip on time. i don{t, courtesy of an outdated travel book which steered me wong. no matter, i still get to see fun things like the lake by Santa Ana, little-tiny-whithered-away-must-be-90-yo ladies carrying wood stacks heavier than yours truly, pretty mountains etc. etc. I also get to be the only person at the lake hostel where I crashed. Spent most of the day hanging in the hammock, reading, napping, staring at the water and swimming every now and again. Have i mentioned it's hotter than haides? At night it's a fricken DELUGE. it's raining so hard, the place where i'm staying is leaking through every imaginable and unimaginable hole so i boot it to another housing option. thankfully there was one. Granted i was already asleep when i started getting rained on inside-it might have been all of 7pm or some such thing.

Day 3.
I finally make it to the volcano. The one I was planning on climbing is closed, courtesy of some seismic activity which was apparently picked up several days ago. Not that anyone saw/felt/smelled anything, but now nobody is allowed to climb it. We can climb it's sister volcano, a mostly dead place with only steam coming out of it. Which is cool too. It's a STEEP bunch of steps running down, then a climb pretty much straight up (what happened to switchbacks? don't ask, they won't tell anyway). You get to putz around the crater for quite a bit, while trying to figure out where oh were the massive quantities of flies are coming from. I didn't discover it. Then a lovely SLIDE down the lava sand back to the bottom of the volcano (goodbye my lovely shoes, i will miss you i'm sure!) and then a torture climb up the million stairs in million degree heat while i curse myrself for not bringing enough water (having finished my supplies at the top of the volcano). Fun times were had by all. Pictures to follow eventually.

Day 4.
I chicken bus it over to the beach. This chicken busing i have not seen before- we're talking people shoved in until you can't fit in anymore, then shoving some more people on top of those anyway. Then following them with some luggage. Damn semana santa. Damn all those local people getting vacation at the same time as i get mine. Damn everybody deciding to go to the beach at the same time. Definitely damn everybody coming to the same beach and taking up all the rooms, beds etc, before i even FINALLY make it there. At least somebody took pity on me and let me stay in a hammock. hurray for nice people everywhere.
First ever surfing lesson-I can stand mostly on all fours for about a second or slightly less. woof. tail wag.
it's really really hot. the ocean is really really hot. you'd think it would be refreshing? it's almost as warm as the air. pfft.
i sleep most of the day in the hammock. in the intervals between sleep i get to read a little bit and then doze off again.
at night i get woken up by a loving mosquito kiss smack on my lower lip--those suckers HUUUURT!! the whole next morning i felt like i had a lip the size of texas. it didn't look as bad as it felt though. itchy itchy scratchy scratchy by this point everywhere. arms legs, neck face, fricken LIP???
turns out palm friday the buses are on a loose schedule of running whenever whereever (a la Shakira) as a li'l o'le lady in the road store tells me. good thing i couldn't get my onward tickets till next day anyway. between a random pickup truck (please don't kill me or kidnap me) and some random colectivo van going smack to where i needed to go i finally make it to my favorite hammock-bedded hostel (what, you think there would be others in a big city like San Salvador, wouldn't you? you'd be wrong). Not that there's much to do around town from what i can tell- folks have been around the hostel for the past several days, nobody came up with a better option than going to see ninja turtles. (really?? really!!! no way. no how)

Day 5. Still going strong but i'll write about it anyway. 4am pick up and until 6am putzing around to get to leave San Salv. for Copan Ruinas in Honduras (via Guatemala) you can always look at the map to figure that one out. At least we're THERE by around 10 am. A small scare of ATMs not working is easily and quickly resolved by apparently turning the card upside down. AAAAH??? OOOOH!!! yeah, i'm smart like that. Copan ruinas.... kinda interesting in that amidst all the destruction they still have these super detailed elements. very weird. pictures to follow once the kids i'd met up with forward me their pictures from today (i brilliantly left film with the pack in the hostel) have i mentioned i'm smart like that?

China Trip

And here are some pictures I couldn't quite get my camera to take, so check out the Terracotta Warriors @ Xi'an, and cave buddhas at Luoyang. Both were quite spectacular and I'm rather bumming I didn't get the pictures I wanted.

The nightmare purple

My hospital just switched to purple scrubs. Aside from the hideousness of the color which looks godawful on everybody and makes my eyes hurt, it apparently had a purpose other than employee disgruntlement. Apparently, this is how we try to decrease infection rate: we'll force everyone to wear the purple scrubs but only inside the hospital. No one will be able to walk in from home (for some people literally from across the street) or go out to get lunch (we have no cafeteria) or run out for a soda while wearing purple--they force to you to change. Which would all be good and dandy IF we could actually change near the OR for example. Instead, we have to change in the bathroom and either lug our crap to the building furthest away where the lockers are, or stash it in the conference room and hope nobody swipes it. Stealing is usually a major issue. My fricken WATER BOTTLE got stolen the other day. I mean COME ON. I think it might've cost a whole $3, who'd want that?? In addition, there usually isn't all that much time between cases (assuming one is actually in the OR as opposed to doing scut on the floor) so it's not like people can get out of a case, run back to their locker, change, go get food outside, then come back, change again, go to the OR. As for the rest of us, the floor scut-monkeys, we can't even get the greens anymore, since the scrub machines only give out purple. We're stuck with what we had time to cheat the machines out of over the past few months.
And as for the theory about decreasing infection rate--are you KIDDING ME??? where did they come up with that? the hospital has more bugs and worse bugs than if i went rolling around new york sidewalk. And there are sterile GOWNS for the sterile field. I want to see the research that shows that forcing people to change clothes outside the hospital decreases infection, before they force us into something this ridiculously inconvenient and ugly to boot. And that's my two cents on the subject.

Wandering about

I got back from call yesterday mostly spaced out and mostly confused. Luckily I still made my eye appointment (which had been postponed and re-postponed courtesy of late evening rounds killing any sort of commitment I might have made) and decided to wander about town, since the day was so nice (and i could always sleep it off in the bad weather). So this way I got to:
1. get a manicure,
2. stroll through random stuff stores and get new sunglasses--must look cool while falling asleep!,
3. finally get a haircut, albeit at a random chain place (at least it had girls inside, most of the weird places i've been passing before had been barber-shops) and hey, at least i dont look like a a dust broom anymore!!,
4. drool at the puppies in a dog show across the street,
5. buy a shirt at a really 3rd world looking store, just because i got cold,
6. yummm, candied almonds from the street vendor,
7. get tossed and shoved around at Daffy's, H+M and Forever 21 without buying a thing
8. buy a cool humongous purse from a fake bag store
9. actually get back home around 7 just in time to play stupid computer games online.
Ah, the weekend off. How sweet it is.

Did you know?

This was an interesting story I heard yesterday, though not in quite as vivid a detail.
A 25 yo girl comes into ER with abdominal pain and vomiting though vomiting started after the pain. KUB shows free air. The girl is stable but she is tender. Attending is called in to take the girl to the OR to see if she perfed an ulcer or what. Right before going to the OR, the attending asks her if she had rough sex the night before (earning himself the looks of "say wha?") and anyway, any such activity is denied. The lap doesnt show any perforation, but there is some fluid in cul-de-sac which ob/gyn evaluates intra-op and says it looks physiological. Next day and (with her father this time in the room), the girl mentions that she may have had enough to drink the night before to not remember anything and or pass out and oh by the way she has a new partner. Apparently during rough sex, air can get pushed up into the uterus and out the fallopian tubes, causing intraperitoneal air with more or less irritating symptoms. Moral of the story: if you think the family is dysfunctional, get the family in the room to get the best sexual history ever.

Just a quickie

a quiet night on call with yet another object vacuumed out of a butt--a big red ball. i mean COME ON people, that one is OBVIOUSLY going to be hard to get out yourself, what were you thinking?? apparently no thinking involved though since my million-to-one-chance, doc! guy has extensive history of falling on objects (like potatoes). If at first you don't succeed keep trying. If it ends you up in a hospital, keep trying again.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane?

Things of the butt...

I am trying to find a picture of the biggest thing I have never would have imagined one would shove up their own rear. The chief that operated has pictures on her phone but that's about it. I have yet to make it down to pathology to take my own pictures, until then I'll just have to describe:
1. You could see this thing on the KUB. The tip was just below the lower ribs
2. It was about 4 inches in diameter. I just looked at a ruler to make sure I was siting a similar number.
3. It looked like a fricken rocket coming out during surgery
4. The guy ended up with a colostomy

There is a lady we're consulting on with what looks like distal obstruction. One of the other interns on my team was "blessed" with having to disimpact this lady on call. The found what looked like plum pits. The nurses washed the plum pits and kept them by the bedside. The next day gave rise to many a speculation for how the plum pits found their way where they did, as the woman's son was found dropping food into her salad-shooter style and indiscriminately. This after having been instructed several times in several languages and with several translators including his own wife that the lady has to be on clears. I'm starting to wonder if he was trying to kill her on the sly and we caught him in the act.

And more on that oedipal subject: a patient's daughter keeps calling and threatening that she's "watching everything and writing everything down" as if just looking for something to sue over. The problem with this is that if there's something to sue over, something bad needs to happen to her mom. You mean you're actually looking for something bad to happen to your mom in the hospital so that you can sue???? I should've been a vet.

Intern impressions 1st two weeks

Being an intern sucks. Being a prelim--an intern who's only there for one year just might suck even more if that's even possible.

An intern: You're at the bottom of the feeding chain--you get shit from attendings, chiefs, seniors, nurses and anybody else who happens to be in the way.

• Your patients keep thinking you're a nurse.
• Your attendings think you're a medical student.
• Your nurses think you're a torture device specifically designed to personally harass each and every one of them.
• Your seniors think you're their secretary. In fact, you pretty much are a secretary but with much worse hours and probably less pay.
• Your chiefs think you're someone on whom they can practice being a boss. As indeed you are. If you take much seriously this can seriously mess you up.

You freak out when anybody refers to you as Dr.

You crack up when other interns answer the page as "this is Dr.So-and-so"

You work long hours pushing papers designed to make the work as inefficient as possible. In fact, you don't even know how the hospital is still standing from the way most things are managed. The whole bureaucracy is designed with the efficiency of a treadmill: you have all the appearance of activity without moving an inch towards the end point. Then you find out that the hospital IS in fact out of money (duh!) and is selling housestaff housing as a short-term solution.

You keep trying to remember why you signed up for this, and keep trying to get to do the stuff you're interested in (say, getting into the OR and doing stuff) only to get foiled in your attempts: anybody who's more senior, or who's staying next year, gets first dibs. If there's anything left over you might or might not be able to get the case.

You keep reminding yourself that jail is not worth strangling anybody, no matter how incredibly annoyed at them you are.

You learn the extentions that page you most frequently and you know when in the day they will start paging you. You return their calls at your convenience, since several will definitely pile up over half an hour to an hour from one extension.

You can write "A+Ox3,NAD,CTAB,RRR,soft NT/ND,dressings c/d/i,nonedematous" in your sleep.

Everyone who's admitted deserves to have a stick for labs at 3am STAT (the labs won't come back till 12pm, but at least you'll see them during day shift. AM labs means results coming out around 9pm or labs not being drawn).

Your service's patients blend in into one morbidly obese patient who has a little bit of everything or at least of the top 2-3 things people are coming in with (John Doe with diverticulitis, acute cholecystitis and Crohns, all at the same time. Oh, and maybe throw in some SBO on top like a cherry)

You run the list 20 times a day.

After evening rounds you try to run away as past as possible to savor the last hour or two before you crash, and start having murderous tendencies toward your fellow-intern on call, who is holding you up.

You start thinking warm food at night is over-rated.

You can't get through a whole movie in one night.

You fall asleep before the seniors in the nursing home do.

You wake up as if you've only had 3 hours of sleep, even if you did crash earlier than your childhood bedtime.

IV coffee stops working.

You realize it's only been 2 weeks.

A mad rant

I understand why incoming residents are required to take the ACLS course before starting work. What I don't understand is how the folks that run these courses still get paid money for what they teach. Call me cranky, but the guy I've had both for basic life support/cpr yesterday and for advanced today flew through his presentation slides either rattling off things or skipping entire slides altogether, saying "this is in your book". And repeating things like "I just want to get us out of here" Which begs the question--what's the point of my sitting through the class if all it's going to do is tell me to read the book? I can read the book in the the comfort of my own apartment (granted, there the A/C won't be set to sub-zero levels). Oh and I won't have to do that after walking through a torrential rainstorm and therefore wearting soaked jeans throughout the freezing class.

My apartment's so swank!!

Moving into this place, I knew that I'll have to look for another apartment and move someplace else for the next three years, since I'll no longer be working for the well-moneyed institution of Beth Israel, and therefore will not have the uber-spiffy subsidized housing in the village. Figuring that, I got minimal and cheapo furniture, since who knows what'll fit into next years' apartment, right?
I finally moved in yesterday, and aside from this place being definitely dark even on the brightest day, I LOVE LOVE LOVE it. This thing is close to everything, it's quiet, it's even bigger than I expected AND has an A/C!! I know, I'm easily pleased, but to top this off I have a decent-size balcony coming out on a courtyard, where I plan to plant my ass every chance I get while it's still summer. I haven't checked out the roof yet, but there is also sunning that must be done out there--I might as well be brown since I've finally moved from the land of the palish green.
That said, the antenna for my tv is not picking up as well as one would've hoped. I guess it's back to ripping episodes of 24 off the net for me! I'll definitely take living in this location over access to even the best series ever (sorry, Alias *was* good for the first few seasons too!)

Graduated thoughts from the peanut gallery

Well, I guess I've finally done it. After 7 years, a little blood, some amount of sweat and excessive tears, not counting the grey hairs or the character flaws acquired, I'm finally getting out of Case and Cleveland. Graduation was on Sunday, nothing holding me back but the packing and the furniture. It's strange, I must have been here for so long, I feel like I've grown into the place. Don't get me wrong, I by no means want to stay here, but at the same time this is the familiar ground now; this is where I'd spent most of my 20s, met most of my friends and went through everything that had been important to me in the past 10 years. There's something like nostalgia already trying to bite me and I haven't even left yet! It's even more ironic now, since such a large number of my friends from here have moved on and moved out over the past few years, so it's not like I can say that I have so many friends out here anymore. Which only makes my friends here that much more precious. I know I am horrible at keeping in touch, and who knows if we'll even talk once I move, and I have no friends in the place to which I'm moving, so I'm scared. It becomes so much harder to meet people when you're not in school anymore: when you're not all the same age and in the same place and more or less same situation. At work it becomes more about the age difference, and the family or single, and whether you've had enough time to brush your teeth let alone hang out and whether you even want to see the people you work with outside of work. I know it all manages to work itself out in the end, somehow, but it doesn't really help knowing this right now.

And the Mammoth Cave pics

If you ever wondered whether to take 400 film or a digital camera into the cave.... take a look at this comparison, see if you can tell which pictures were taken with what camera! Just click here

Goin' down to Kentucky

I packed all my camping shit into the car Friday morning in the rain and headed down to Kentucky to check out Mammoth Cave. Along the way I realized that 1)i'd of course managed to forget a bunch of stuff at home (typical!) 2)if it kept raining like this much longer I'd need to start collecting pairs of animals into my car and 3)it's a hella religious bible belt out there. I seriously wished I'd had a camera phone to take pictures of some road signs. My favorites were: "HELL IS REAL" in the middle of a corn field along I-71 and one with 5 out of 10 commandments chosen apparently at random on a sign surrounded by others advertising "ADULT books and video", "Gentlemen's club" and "XXX Dance parlor". Gotta love bible belt.
But it's all fun and games until somebody's eye gets poked out, or until my right to drink gets taken away. Now I'm by no means a big drinker, but I like to be able to enjoy a nice beer after I've driven for 7+ hours straight and especially after I hung out in the parking lot of the Mammoth Cave park visitors' center waiting for my friend Ben to get his ass to the park from Chicago (there was no cell phone reception and apparently the boy got lost. Anyway, picture this, two tired and hungry kids make it to a Walmart/supermarket with full intention of buying some alcohol to soothe the aching butts and are told that "this is a dry county". ARRRRRGH. At this point it's a matter of principle and we drive down to the next county (about 30 miles away) just to load up on the alcohol for the next couple of days. We were so pissed and hungry we almost got a speeding ticket (but thankfully got off with a "courtesy warning"... this would normally be accompanied by a comment about how i feel about cops. but in view of this unexpected lucky occurrence this shall be skipped.
The country around the park is a trip in itself: there are more "rock shops" than one would ever think would be necessary on the planet (who buys ROCKS??). Fortunately there was other stuff we could play with: (I got a block to sharpen my machete--yeah! i'm dangerous now!!! and a little folding knife for all those occasions when i just really want to have a knife. Just in case i turn into Doug and want to go around "killing shit", or just for making holes). There were a couple of fainting goats I got to chase around and try to startle, but they were not impressed with how scary I was. Come to think of it, neither was I. As it was, I did not manage to make them faint. They just laughed at me in their goat-fashion. I also got to go horseback riding for the first time EVER in my life! Which was fun even though I could feel my sitting bones for the next couple of days. Unfortunately we only got to walk the horses, none of the trotting or galloping or any of that crazy wild stuff.
As it happens, we got through three bottles of wine the night before doing the wild cave tour at Mammoth cave, which basically comes down to waking up with a hangover and feeling like hell, taking down camp and praying we didnt forget anything (oh yeah, i couldnt find my keys so i got the honors of waking up the whole camp-site just because the siren went off for a while. This is then followed by much undercaffeinated spelunking (gotta love that word!!!!) for 6 hours and a drive back in the ridiculous rain for another 7 hours. In fact, I didnt make it. Around 50 miles from home i just had to stop and take a nap, because I was falling asleep on top of hydroplaning and that just seemed like badness waiting to happen. It was still raining when I got to Cleveland and apparently had been raining non-stop since Friday when I left. It's still raining as I'm writing this and the evil weathermen promise rain for the next several days. How can there be so much water up there??

Finally Belize pictures!

What I've been able to recover from my laundered camera (thankfully the memory card was still good!) is now up in the Belize folder on my yahoo picture dump

Belize trip-Part II

Although I had tried to lose the roommate by the end of my stay on the island--since I didn't want to commit either homicide or suicide (oh, i was told that muder is only worth 7 years in Belize, so it might have been worth it after all...)--that was pretty much unsuccessful, and he managed to tag along on my trip inland. Thankfully, he was planning on changing his flight to an earlier date, so I kept hoping for earlier rather than later. Anyway, three hours on a re-painted school-bus (i dont know why they bothered with the paint) and we rolled into San Ignacio, from where i planned to go check out some waterfalls, caves and whatever other hikes.
Wandering around town, it was about a half an hour walk to a Cahal Pech (aka the place of ticks)--the pictures from which will be forthcoming, once i figure out how to knock some life into my camera. While climbing up some steps of leftover mayan temples/royal living quarters or whatnot to take in the pretty views (ok, so i'm not an archaeology buff, sue me), a couple of tourists and I were approached by this local-looking older guy who just started telling us about the ruin (who knew that this was the new way of doing the guided tours?) which weirded the daylights out of the couple who proceeded to retreat faster than you can remember what the name of the ruin was.
The next day I signed up for a tour of the Actun Tunichil Muknal (everyone just says ATM) tour. This was supposed to be one of the more newly discovered caves in the region, full of mayan artifacts that were left untouched, including all sorts of pottery and human sacrificial remains. Contrary to what I normally do, I decided to go with a larger group just to dilute the anger that had been building up towards my roommate (I was seriously considering how much harm I could do with a bottle opener at this point). That actually ended up being a pretty good idea--the group had a great dynamic and by the time we made it to the entrance of the cave through the three river crossings, everyone was almost as chatty as me. or maybe i just couldnt shut up for the 17 of us and so it seemed that way. or it could've been all the termites we ate on the way (eeeew, no YOU try it!! tastes like carrots... doesn't really smell like chicken) . So next time a place I live in gets assaulted by the buggers, I won't need no stinkin' Orkin man! I'll just make a meal of the suckers!!
What can I say, the cave was absolutely amazing. You swim in before you can start wading (rock... ow, ROCK!!!) past all sorts of spectacular stalactites, stalagmites, sparkly curtainy formations (don't touch the sparkly--according to the guides, the skin oils interfere with growing formations: they were explaining it by the hydrophilic/hydrophobic theory) and generally spectacular rock arrangements. Again, the pictures are coming, I hope. The second part of the trip is on dry surface and that is where all the artifacts are--tons of pots (broken, to release the spirit of the pot), strangely arranged skeletons (apparently Maya used to cut up their captives and leave them for sacrifice, and in the furthest part of the tour a normally arranged girl skeleton. The guide was saying that the number of artifacts and human remains increased towards the decline of the civilization--kind of appeasement for the gods. You come out of the cave 5-6 hours later and discover that the sun is setting, and I just wanted to go stay in the cave for longer. No worries, I figured there'll be some caving involved during my wilderness med class, that was coming up.
I wanted to go around the area exploring the next day, but found out that the taxis were charging exorbitant fees, and I was too much of a scaredy cat to race the belizean drivers, so renting was out. I was left with what seemed like a good idea at the time--a tour that would go around to most of the areas that seemed like fun--some waterfalls some pretty woods etc. Turned out instead that it was a "van-tour"... there was at most 10-15 minutes of walking involved at a time. The guide was pretty un-sociable (he even ate by himself, even though the group was only 5 people) and would just kind of drop us at a place, and tell us we need to go when it was time to go to the next place. Maybe if I brought a big batch of sangria with me this would've gone over better. Otherwise, it felt quite a bit like being dropped at overlooks on the highway: here, scenic overlook... I guess, a good resting up though, since the day after I ended up going over to Tikal, in Guatemala. Oh and this was the day I finally said see ya never to the roommate, as my tourmates from ATM looked on and laughed (apparently I was not the only one with the impression that he was completely whack!)
There are day trips that go from San Ignacio to Tikal which, considering the trip there is at least 3 hours, seems like a sin. I decided to hop the tour there, then stay the night and come back the next day, then head down to Belmopan for the class. I was actually very happy I did that. Although the guide did not contribute much, other than the chronology of the site, I would've wondered if I'd missed out on something had I just gone in by myself, plus the ride there was SO much shorter as I was going to find out on the way back! Anyway, Tikal is this amazingly huge city mostly covered over by the jungle and only partially excavated, something resulting in a very surreal experience. During the day it tends to be more crowded and is HOT HOT HOT while you climb up all the temples you're allowed to (the closed off one of the temples after two people fell from it-eeeeek). The tour group left after lunch (don't get the ham sandwiches!! no i'm serious! everybody chowed down tons of food which was much needed after all that climbing, and then the ham sandwiches came out: people got two slices of white bread with a slice of ham in the middle. on a little desert plate), and I went over to the place where you can rent-a-hammock with a mosquito net for the night, plopped down my stuff and took a nap. I woke up to sudden commotion in at least three languages going on all around me (I was the only one in the hammocks when I landed there)--apparently the bus from Flores, Guatemala (nearest big city) just got in.
I ended up hooking up with two Netherlanders (hee hee) and an American who were all traveling together for a while, to go and see the sunset. Since they got into the site after 3pm, they could also go in in the am and see the sunrise the next day. When we got to the top of the pyramid (which is supposedly the best site to see the sunset from since you can see all the other ruins around and the jungle and tons of birds and monkeys etc, there was a filming crew there, filming an interview with this little old guy dressed up in traditional indian garb. I don't know who that guy thought he was talking to, but he talked on FOR-EVER and EVER for every single question. And we all had to sit there quietly and not move anywhere in view of the camera-which was of course everywhere the best views were. So aside from getting more murderous thoughts into my head about tossing people and equipment off the top of the temple (after all, I wasn't in Belize anymore, and it was no longer 7 years, who knows what it is in Guatemala) I had a great time. The views were spectacular; parrots were flying everywhere; pictures are still stuck in my camera. We considered going over to the next temple to hang out without the camera crew, but we would've missed the sunset.
So the moment the sun set, we hiked over to the taller temple to try and catch the sunset again. Nevermind that on the way there we got yelled at by the guard that it was 6pm and everyone should be leaving the park. Nevermind that it was seriously getting darker and there's no lighting in the park. Anyway, we get to this temple and go to check out the side under construction (which, I'm cringing at even now--this is Guatemala we're talking about. If anything happens we're screwed) on the other side than the one I saw during the day, and lo and behold there's a great little platform to watch the sky there. And then the darkness starts setting over the jungle and I start thinking that I probably should head out since my vision kind of sucks in the dark, and I don't really want to have a twisted ankle for the class; plus there's not that much else to see. But the two 22-year olds think it's a spectacular idea to watch for complete darkness settle. Fine, I'd go by myself, but having unfortunately read the LP version where stuff happens to tourists in remote areas, and where jaguars appear out of the middle of the jungle etc. etc. I'm freaked out. Also, I dont have the map of the site. Finally, after both me and the other girl (also my age) have been freaking out for a while, the boys decided to grace us with their presence (we'd gone down the stairs before, not wanting to break our necks on the steps without a flashlight). Unfortunately on the way back a) we only had one flashlight and b) the guy that thought he knew the place and we followed led us someplace weird and we ended up wandering around for a while getting progressively hungrier and hungrier in my case. I was ready to eat the jaguar if he decided to show up, never mind how i'd catch it. Of course at this point it's completely dark, but thankfully the paths are white sand, so we can follow ok whithout a light. I keep trying to avoid anything dark on the road, since who knows if it's a snake or whatnot (did i mention my vision is fuzzy at night?). And finally, when we are almost out, we notice a row of moving lights (must be the guards, who'll totally kick us out if they find us in the park after dark, we think!). So the most logical thing for us to do, of course is to get off the white road where we'll be obviously seen, and walk across the "lawn". Unfortunatley the lawn turns out to have one humongous rock in the middle that two of us hit and go head over hills over (rock! ..... OH F@*%^!!!! ROOOOCK!!!)... only to find out that the row of moving lights are in fact the little lights along the road to the next-door hotel. Yeah. Thankfully we made it back before electricity cut out at 9 and even managed to get some grub out of the kitchen staff.

Belize-Part I

Well, I suppose I might as well start with some stories from my trip since I have to start somewhere. I got to Belize pretty much on my birthday, planning on at least some partying even if i didnt manage to get any monkeys to dance around me while clapping coconuts. After emailing for a while with the ever-amazing Cori, I decided against my original plan of Caye Caulker, since all the partying seemed to be located on the Ambergris Caye. Since I've heard of Ambergris as the "resorty" place and definitely as the "more expensive" place, I'd set about trying to find myself a roommate as soon as I got on the boat to the key. Found this seemingly normal tall bald dude, early 30s, seemed very laid back, who wasn't even going for the diving but just to check out the keys. Find roommate__x__. What I didn't expect was that most of the hotels I'd thought of staying would be booked (this as I'm lugging around a backpack worth half my bodyweight back and forth across town). We did eventually find a very nice room, even with a view of the sea off the balcony/patio thingie. Very very swank.
And of course I forget my PADI card at home. Let alone the fact that I'd never even sent out the advanced paper version to get the new card since oh, two years ago (they wanted a head shot, and what am i, an actress to have head shots lying around? then of course i did get some passport photos for the residency applications, but by then i'd forgotten all about the silly piece of paper, well, it WAS two years later after all). So anyway, I signed up for my dives and went booking over to the internet place to get a "replacement" card for my "lost" open water card (well, at least it gave me a number that the diveshop could look up).

Lucky me, I get to go to the famous Blue Hole for my first dive after not having been in the water for two years. And boy, do I know I'm going to have issues equalizing. But they have a trip going and so I pretty much need to go, since who knows when their next Blue hole trip will be. So I drag my sorry sleepy ass out of bed at 5am (and this is 5am central time so it's even earlier!!) and spend the next 2 hours on the boat getting my internal organs made into a smoothie by the boat while my sitting bones try to make it out through the skin every time the boat comes down hard. We finally get there.... and I get in the water early, knowing it'll take me a while to go down.... and I get to about 45 feet and can't seem to equalize past that. I watch pretty much everybody else go down as i try to force my ears to pop, but instead they just hurt and make me go up again. Finally, one of the divemasters shows up and tells me that they dont have the time to wait for me since it's such a deep dive and to go back to the boat. I almost cried. I tried snorkelling with my fancy oxygen tank but the circle reef is really shallow and not all that to see, so a basically spent the dive sitting on the boat burning my nose (all 15 minutes of it, since it WAS a 120foot+ dive). I did get to go on the other two dives on the way back, but between the 17 people that went, so much sand got kicked up, the visibility went to squat. I did get to see a bunch of flying fish on the trip back as well as on the next day's trip to Tenriffe (again, the two hour pounding of sitting bones... it hurt to sit down for the next couple of days). Surprisingly, the dives I enjoyed the most were the dives that were the closest and the cheapest--the reef right along Ambergris. You name it, I saw it (turtles, sharks, barracuda, tons of pretty fishies, eels, rays etc. I took tons of pictures on my handy dandy 50 ft disposable which I've yet to develop). I didn't see sea horses, but rumor has it they're around mangroves, so maybe next time.

It's been only about a year or two, so apparently it's time to start blabbering again. I just got back from an amazing trip to Belize , and it seems that travelling brings out the verbal diarrhea in me. Unfortunately for the past several days I've been doing nothing but apartment searching, until I realized that what I would want and what I could afford in NYC never existed on the same planet or in the same dimension. And so I've decided to go for the dorm, uh i mean hospital housing. Yippie. If anyone wants to buy all my worldly possessions from Cleveland, lemme know! There's 7 years worth of stuff up for grabs!
OH, and to the right is the place I stayed for my wilderness medicine class in Belize. Did I mention it was SPECTACULAR?

Makes me wonder..... I talked to someone today who says they tried to kill themselves... with a gun... by shooting at their foot. I wonder if they thought they were going to bleed to death out of a toe or something. Maybe hoped for gangrene... who knows.

A few of the things being celebrated on Friday were a couple of birthdays (on off dates), an anniversary, and a thesis defense. There were about bizillion people between Sami's kitchen and the living room, of whom I knew even knew a few (a rather drastic change from the last party he'd thrown that I'd attended). You know you have a full bar going, when all the liquor bottles have a hard time fitting on the dining table, so nobody was complaining. I also think that some people permanently camped out by the bottles, either to keep their glass full or out of social phobia, you pick. Sami even worried about the music for about 5 minutes, even though if there was one person who could hear it over people talking that one person must have been sitting next to the speakers.
The conclusion? Today must be squished by a hangover the size of Wisconsin. And some junk food. In fact, I've reached NEW levels in that: I got McDonald's breakfast for the first time in my life. Yes, yes, i'm no longer a McD virgin. The fact that it was pretty good also kind of scares me--instead of being addicted to Big Al's #7, am I going to be a fast-food junkie too?

Shawnsee and some dude stole my camera to take fuzzy pictures. Figures.  

Stefan and Maribel 

Everybody in the house say "awww" 

Les Belles--Maribel and Noelle 

Ben and Peter--the dudes with the beers 

Oh baby. What can I say? This picture just cracks me up. Dave and Lewis in conversation. 

The fresh doctor's in the house! Go Maribel! 

Maribel, Peter C., Peter O., Ben and Irene 

Sami-The host with the most caught in the headlights 

I do believe I forgot to tell yet another story! I got back from Colca canyon around 6 in the evening, after being on the bus for something to the order of 7 hours (which is unbelievable, considering Colca canyon is supposed to be in Arequipa's backyard!!!). In any case, I was exhausted from the hike, the nausea, the not being able to eat... so I just crashed, but not before finding out that the two aussies who had gone to climb Chachani (the supposedly easiest mountain over 6000 meters) had actually not made it to the top, that they both got really bad altitude sickness, so one of them turned around and one of them continued up but only until (drumroll please) their guide got swept down by an avalanche. The guide was apparently fine, and the kid made it back down alright, though going slightly hypothermic and incoherent. To celebrate the return of the crew all in one piece everyone went out drinking, except for me, i said i was going to crash for a couple hours and then join in. Around 12, one of the aussies woke me up to check on me (isnt that sweet?) and decided to accompany me on my quest for food (since i felt just fine when i
woke up... and hungry. We got food and hung out for a couple of hours and when we were almost back at the hostel we saw two guys walking in front of us.... one was the other aussie (the one who had to go back down after the guide got washed off)... the other was some dude in a trenchcoat and a wig.
Not knowing whether the kid was aware that the guy was a MALE, we called over to him, found out that he was completely wasted and was apparently bringing "her" back to the hostel where the danish kid was already waiting (getting ready? i dont want to know). The danish kid apparently saw "her" flash some breasts at him while they were walking back to the hostel, and decided that they just HAD to get her. And that was my first encounter with how one ends up picking up a male prostitute. Needless to say, up until I left the guys didn't live it down, and i'm sure that even after I left, they kept getting made fun of. Well, DUH!