Sunday, February 17, 2008

On a happier note

Karen and I went to Bliss cafe for Valentines. They held a limited engagement vegetarian buffet, with two sets of music from a wonderful vocal quintet. It was a real nice and romantic evening. We are hoping Jim, the owner, will be able to open his other business idea, a "canteen" style food offering at the Buddhist temple about 100m from our school. The place is great, there is a Zen rock garden, lots of interesting books, real good music and free weekend art films. It is a fairly unknown establishment among locals so it is funny to go there and see all these Swiss and Germans and Americans packed into the place from time to time. Jim is an American Ex-Pat from Chicago. He and his wife have been all over SEA for the past 20+ years, or so. They have settled in Baguio, and now they run what must be the most pleasant restaurant in the city. All the food is prepared by his wife Shanti, and from scratch, on the spot. Even the rice. That makes for a long evening, which actually turns out to be perfect, as the number of local art exhibition, interesting books, posters and artifacts from Jim and Shanti's travels engages the mind in pleasant ways, and puts the prospect of food on temporary hold, at least until it is served. The menu has many offerings, but most notably to me are the set meals. They consist of entree, salad, dessert and beverage for about $5. They are either Indian, Korean, Mexican (yes, Mexican!) or what I don't exactly know called simply and wonderfully, "Heaven" and "Earth", but we love it. There is NO MEAT whatsoever in any of it, and Shanti has a knack for making some pretty accurate interpretations of meat products out of Soy, gluten and who knows for sure. Anyways, we are going tonight to eat and watch "The Elephant Man".

My charmed life

I always seem to be at the center of disaster... Eathquake, flood, landslide, typhoon... Now fire... Part of my school burned down yesterday right before my eyes. Nobody was hurt thankfully. I have never seen a large building engulfed in flames before in person. Brought back some unpleasant memories. It was pretty unreal. Waiting for the locusts that should be arriving any minute now...

http://youtube.com/watch?v=bfFpDiCb5XE&feature=related

Monday, February 11, 2008

After a long hiatus

I saved up some stuff to type.

Anyways, grats to Skyler for having the "biggest beard" in the family. I am not exactly sure what entails the grand prize, but it should really be something. That thing is way, way large, and quite in charge.

Since November, I guess a few interesting things have gone on with us. The bad news, one of our good Iranian friends left, and decided to stay home, rather than return to school. Then one of our Kuwaiti friends. Sad. We really loved those guys and their company. But, we did manage to have a great time during our holidays. We took two of our friends to Sagada, went caving, and had a nice time. We went to Burgos, and really, really, really, quiet and deserted beach. We had the whole place to ourselves, with our friends Grace and Mao.

Our hospital dutues have been fairly exhaustive this semester. Learning a lot during them, thank goodness. Having some issues with the administration, and teachers. That will not go away in my or my grandchildren's lifetimes I guess. There is just a lot of "poop" here in certain areas that seems a little too ground in.

I really wanted an eee pc. I got this crazy idea to get one, then backed out. I will wait for the 9 inch screens and Wimax. Speaking of computers, I am living the Linux life now. Totally gave up Windows, and never looking back. I recommend "Puppy Linux" to anyone. It is 100 MB only, and runs off of your ram. Everything is easy enough to learn, and it won't overwrite your old OS should you need to go back. I put it on a friends ancient computer, and it runs like a scalded cat. Don't toss out that old computer yet!

Karen and I had the same American patient (she had the 7-3, me, the 3-11 shift).. It was great, because everybody including the Doctors were afraid of the guy, and we just charged in a saved the day for the guy. It felt great to be working for what will likely be a more typical patient for us, and he really tested our abilities. We did great, and so did he. (He was discharged the day after our last duty day after nearly two weeks, and I got to congratulate him on his way out ) It felt real good to see the product of our hard work "walk out the door" towards his health and future.


Another two months, and we are done for the year, and a break that we will be sharing with... MY MOM AND GRANDMOTHER!!!! We are so excited to have them. I can't wait to show them around.