what would you do?

There are times in life where you feel like jumping onto bandwagons. Not because you really want to, but mainly because everyone else is and they're going that much faster that you feel like you're left behind...

So what would you do when the following occurs in the space of a month:

1) the last person you hooked up with about a month ago gets engaged

2) someone you used to really care about gets a partner

3) you pseudo-lil sis gets a boyfriend

4) your resi gets engaged

5) one of your closest chronically single friends finds someone...

What do you do?

a)  of the 5 or so girls that have shown interest recently - pick one that you like and get it on

b) go out with someone you think is hot, but is younger than you (never before has this happened and is really not that big a deal

c) go out and meet randomz

d) remind yourself that in 2 wks, you'll be in Singapore/Malaysia/Thailand, then you'll be going to AMSA, then you might be going to the Netherlands. After all that, doing Xmas and NYE in Hong kong/Japan. And that all that is much more fun when single...

I think I'll go with the latter =P

S'pore and more!

Due to my laziness and inept abilities of time management, it's taking much longer than expected to write these stories. So I'm resorting to the fun technique of magic realism and fast forwarding from highlight to highlight. Time, after all, is a metaphysical concept...

Singapore gleamed in the horizon as the very first ray of the still hidden sun arced through the atmosphere and hit my eye even as the giant fireball slept below the horizon. Well, more accurately, it gleamed because it had so many lights! I've always had a fascination with flying into countries in the dark - just to see all the lights glowing.

...

It is 4:30am. I had 2 hrs of sleep on the plane. I should be tired, by my adrenaline rush from just being in S'pore has me at 100% awakeness. I struggle behind Jimbo with my luggage and board the "MRT" - the local train network. Moments earlier, we were informed that a $7 ticket would be enough to get us from the airport to our station near the hotel. I'm still sceptical.

The trains themselves are very clean. I suppose they would be if you were in a country that could arrest you for littering. Oh, and they're fast and well designed too! In less than 20 mins were half way across the (admittedly small) country. We get off at our station and let our eyes adjust to the twilight around us. The city sounds like it's slowly going through it's morning wake-up schedule: it cleans itself (or at least, the street cleaners do that job) and prepared for the upcoming day by letting the commuters enter. The near darkness makes the scene look like a film noir movie.

...

Right. Time to dump the luggage and explore! Asians here I come! First things first, find the hotel. Jimbo and I follow the map drawn in paint which (surprisingly) was from the official site. Do these guys not know of Google maps? Apart from being not to scale, it is also incorrect. Streets that never meet are touching like newly-formed couples. Others that are actually touching appear like ageing people who no longer find their partners interesting and stay the fuck away. Just to set the records straight - it was a shit map, not my inability to follow directions that made us take 1.5hrs to find a hotel, that was literally less than a km from where we got off the train. The heavy luggage didn't help.

Travel lesson 1: No matter how light your luggage seems when you pack - it is much heavier when you to carry it for any period greater than 10mins. To realistically gauge how much you should be carrying - pack, then walk around your house, after someone has closed all the doors, so you have to balance all the paraphernalia as you try and grasp irritating handles. For added challenge - get your family to bump into you.

...

We walked through the streets of the city - you could tell that this was the first world. Efficient, emotionless and monotonous - just doing what concrete doing what it was meant to do. No potholes, no rubbish, no excrement. Nothing to distinguish one stretch of road from the next. I needed food and luckily, at this time of day, it was very easy to find. Just look any group of people and you've found breakfast. At this hour, only restaurants were open and with food so cheap, even the locals found it more convenient to eat out for breakfast. Or maybe I can't tell tourists apart for shit.

After breakfast (which cost all of $3.40, for the both of us!) we began our explorations... stay tuned!

nepal: a contrast

The following is a direct copy of my "essay" to the faculty. Yes, I'm being lazy and not posting stories, but here is something to show what I've got in store.

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The first thing that hits you as you stagger out the airport is the people. Lots of them. And for some reason, they all want to carry your bags. My colleagues and I later found out that it was one way of earning money: ask foreigners for loose change in exchange for carrying their bags to the cars. Since the exchange rate was so poor in the countries favour, practically any currency would triple its amount in rupees. In the case of the Australian dollar, it would give exactly 56 times its value. For my two colleagues and I, that was the beginning of our six week elective in Nepal.

As we meandered through the streets at the neck breaking speed of 30km/h, the mind can’t help but contrast the pot-hole ridden, narrow roads which seem to wear garbage as a second skin with their utopian relatives in Australia. Indeed, Nepal was a country which was at great contrasts with Australia and the roads were only the beginning...

My first day at hospital was spent accepting that a giant building which looked like it had been painted in dust was, in fact, a hospital. The wards were literally steel frame beds where patients hunkered against the cold below blankets that had seen better days. Occasionally, you would have one that had an oxygen cylinder beside it. Air conditioning, monitoring equipment and “remember to wash your hands” signs were nowhere to be seen. Scrubbing in for theatre literally involved washing your hands with soap; no povidine solution or chlorhexidine in sight. At least they had sterile gloves. In fact, it was the only place in the hospital that had them; everywhere else used the ones from surgery that had been used and washed.

Even the patient population and common diseases were very different. Surprisingly, for people so thin, diabetes was also a growing epidemic over there, along with COPD. The latter came as no surprise considering 85% of their population were smokers. As a student from Australia, my list of differential diagnoses for any condition was almost useless. When asked what my thoughts were on a middle aged man who presented with microscopic haematuria, my differentials of nephrotic syndrome, UTI or prostate problems were quickly brushed aside by the physician. When I asked what his differentials were he exclaimed, “obviously, it’s TB cystitis!” As I mentioned above, my differentials were a world apart.

Majority of the population in Nepal subscribe to the Hindu religion in Nepal. This presented itself in quite a stark contrast to modern day Australia, where many are Atheists, Agnostic or, at best, Spiritual. Most people were in some way devout, going to the temples to pray on a regular basis. The main concern to me, however, was the subsequent absence of beef (more accurately, steak) at any given restaurant. Cows are considered sacred by the Hindu people; hence devouring them is seen as an act of sacrilege. Their close cousins, the buffalo, sadly are not covered under the same religious veil and can be quite commonly found on menus as “buff”.

Australia, being a first world country, is concerned with laws, policies, efficiency and the use of the tax-payers dollar. The concern of the Nepalese government seems slightly at odds with ours. Mass culling of the previous monarchy by the prince-heir left the entire nation shocked and only now is the government coming to terms and trying to restructure against thousands of years of tradition. Due to this, laws seem more like “guidelines” and the state of the roads and facilities really does make one wonder just where the tax-payers money is being spent. Or at least, if there are any tax payers at all. The relative inefficiency of just about everything from going shopping to sitting in an out-patient clinic leaves you with a feeling of strange restlessness and with the desire to stand up and yell “if you just combined this (metaphorical) step with that (metaphorical) step in this process, you would be about 300% more efficient!” or “Does anyone, let alone a doctor, need a coffee break every 20 minutes?!” Sadly, the aforementioned statements were not over-exaggerations.

In light of all this negativity, I had one of the best rotations of my medical life so far in Nepal. This is due to the first thing I noticed when I arrived: its people. Initially, as mentioned above, the general consensus was that they were just trying to cheat tourists. However, the more I got to know the people, the more they seemed genuinely friendly. Not only that, they were lacking that emptiness and the growing restlessness that exists in the inhabitants of many first world countries, where abundance and luxury leave you with a lack of purpose and a need for the next big thing. Instead, the Nepalese people seemed quite content with the very fact that they were alive. Survival was a very real goal for the entire nation, and as long as they did, every one of them seemed content. That very stress made them seem completely at ease most of the time. Their stresses seemed natural, coming from not having enough money for food or electricity (question of survival), not from trivial “What do I wear tonight?” or “What does that boy/girl really think of me?” Sure, such conundrums did exist, but they seemed almost immune to the existential crisis that one can see here on any given day.

So at the end of the day, what did I think of Nepal? In one word: awesome! The streets were a mess, law was a fictional word and efficiency a concept in fairy tales, but it was the people that lived there that made everything worthwhile. They hadn’t lost focus on what mattered; it wasn’t the money or the clothes that motivated them, it was spending time with each other, which brings me to my last point. This “essay” is obviously not one that is typical of the genre, though my previously defined objectives of exploring the culture, history, structure and spirituality are covered in the paragraphs above. After experience such an atypical country, I hope it can be understood why this atypical format seemed far more apt for the purpose of this essay. I hope you agree.

a day in Darwin

The warm glow of the sun made my reticular activating system rise out of it's slumber. Melatonin did it's thang and I was awake, suprisingly, at the early hour of 8am!

Did I mention warm? I stepped out of our air-con room and into 32 degree heat! It was 8:30am!

Anyway, after our night of shenanigans and quite little sleep, all of us merry men were very hungry. So we packed our bags and headed out in search of adventure... well, food actually. After breakfast, we decided that we should run a muck and at least a fraction of what Darwin had to offer. We, much later, discovered that it didn't offer much.

In our complementary copy of the Darwin tourist map, we had the old War War II Storage Tunnels marked. We headed off there as our 1st tourist stop, which was meant to pass by a myriad of other smaller attractions on the way. We had severely overestimated the scale of the map, as the entire "tourist attraction" spots of Darwin were contained in a space that was not even 2 sq. km. The infamous look-outs looked out onto a scene that was exactly the same as 10m away from said look-out, or from any point along that stretch of road!

After nearing out destination of the tunnels, we realised that it had taken us longer than expected to get there, even though we were sure the distance wasn't that great. Karswell pointed out that during our journey of say 600m max, we had probably stopped no less than 3 times for water. The temperature was ridiculous! No wonder they crammed everything into such a small space - there's not enough water for tourists to wander any further than that area! (Well, actually it's just that there are no water fountains outside the city block and hence if you ventured out - u'd probably die. Now that I think about it, explains all the carrions on the outskirts of the city.)

Anyway, the WWII tunnels were, well...exactly what they claimed to be - some underground tunnels on the side of a hill. As much fun as it was walking through giant piping, I don't think I'll be going back there. At least it was much cooler in there. Our constant thirst was quietened.

They even had park benches in there!

Well after all that excitement, we decided to go into the "city" and indulge in some international cuisine, otherwise known as Mc Donalds. Of interest, the frozen coke doesn't really stay frozen when you step outside the premises. We explored "town" for a bit (because, really, a bit is all that's really there) and I found my next book to read - Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami - go get it, it was awesome!

Afterwards, we ran along to the water, only to discover that there was a variety of "DO NOT ENTER WATER" and "Crocodiles like tourists" signs nearby. So we went to a pier to look out at the beautiful blue ocean and relatively nice beach (relative to Melbourne) as this was as close as we were getting to it without the risk of serious bodily injury. At pier, we found a strange video display/museum thingy - we only entered as the booth was filled with air-con comfort.

It turned out to be the plan for a huge resort/apartment block/convention centre complex as proposed by the local government. The video played, showing us an artist's impression of the place which, btw- did look quite nice. It was even going to have a protected wave pool beach. All of us looked at it and had the feeling that there was something distinctly wrong with the picture. Karswell then pointed out that the "artist" must've not been from Darwin - there were too many people outdoors in his depictions.

Oh - and that was the other thing about Darwin - even near the shopping centres, etc - there was hardly anyone around!

Post lunch, we ran off to the movies to escape the heat. Ended up watching "No country for old men", which was ...interesting (but in a good way). It's the Coen bros gone hard-core art-house. Worth a watch.

Basically, our day kinda ended there. The heat, combined with the constant need for water made us air-con junkies: One hit just wasn't enough. We wandered through the "city" (I just can't bring myself to not use quotation marks) and ran from one air-con store to another. Though "ran" is a bit of a misnomer, it was more of a very slow saunter.

And here is a random park bench...

By the end of the day, we returned to aforementioned hostel, only to discover that there was a nice, cosy and (more importantly) air-conditioned bar, right next to the office! We lounged there and talked crap and finalised our packing.

Really I do! (No insecurity here... no sir)

Soon Karswel, Jimbo and I were on the bus to the airport, soon to depart to Singapore. All was well.

Except that Karswel had left his phone at the said bar! We get to the airport when the usual self-patting-down thing happens. "Where's my phone?" is heard over and over again in the air. He rings his phone and luckily someone picks it up on the otherside and thankfully, that someone is nice enough not to be a thief. The phone gets handed over to a bus driver who is also driving to the airport and 20mins later, there is a very happy Karswel with a phone in his hand.

And this time, all was really well and we left for Singapore (from now on, to be called S'pore)