Blog bombing

Since Internet is so impossible here, I've been writing my blog every day and just updating this online when I get access, which is why I'm bombing you with information - it's going to be like this I'm afraid, no news for ages and then suddenly 10 posts in a row.

Sad to say, connecting to the internet was the thing that got me most excited so far. Funny how isolated you feel when you are used to being connected all the time, even for an absence of 2 days. That really is a sad dependency. Anyhow, logged on to find that I already had several new friend requests on facebook (which is huge in Ghana – everyone is on it all the time, even in between patients in clinic), which made me smile.

Tuesday was another eye opener (har har) in theatre, where I observed small incision (extracapsular) cataract extraction, and Dr Prince was teaching one of the Ghanian doctors, Dr Gyasi, phaecoemulsification. The day started off well with a car breakdown on the way in at the busiest junction imaginable – we had to be pushed offroad by an extremely sturdy young man who pushed the car with all of us sitting in it – and then taxi’d to our final destination. Theatre, though air conditioned, was extremely warm – I was soon sweating attractively and profusely under my mask. Fascinating differences: they use tryptan blue to dye the anterior capsule for capsulorhexis (probably fascinating to no one who reads this blog). What I mean is, they use a blue dye which they inject into the anterior chamber of the eye. This dyes the front of the lens capsule, which is the envelope that holds the lens in place, and which needs to be opened (capsulorrhexis) to extract the lens in a cataract operation. The dye is to make the capsule easier to see. Why is this interesting? Because  usually in cataract surgery no dye is needed to see the anterior capsule; you use the light reflected from the back of the eye to visualise it. But the cataracts here are so dense that there is no light reflected from the back of the eye and so you have to dye the capsule to peel it.

Another interesting thing – big incisions, superior approach. Why is this interesting? In phaecoemulsification you normally use a temporal approach with a small incision, which minimises the amount of distortion the eyeball suffers, which minimises astigmatism. Here, it doesn’t matter how much astigmatism you end up with – because the patients do not do any close work. A vision of 6/24 is great vision, because the comparison is to counting fingers or light perception. For the same reason, they do not do biometry – i.e. measuring how long or short the eye is, to decide what strength lens to put in – they just put in any old lens! This blew my cone, and I’m not really sure how I feel about it.

Cleanliness was also a massive issue. Scrub technique was haphazard. There were mosquitoes in theatre. Instruments were ‘sterilised’ with a quick dip in a soap solution. And yet, apparently, their infection rates are low (I would love to see this data). Consent was a thumbprint on a little slip of paper saying, “I agree to the following operation (usually not filled in) to be performed under local or general anaesthetic, and understand there may be complications or further surgery may be needed.”  Cone. Blown.

We operated till 4:30 then had some food. The consultant was really struggling – it was hot, the operating microscope was at an odd angle and difficult to adjust, there weren’t enough chairs, the phaeco machine only had one setting, none of the instruments were quite right – and it was so fascinating for me to watch because it’s hard to appreciate how difficult surgery is when things aren’t quite right, until you’ve seen it. Surgery is such a controlled business usually – after all, you are cutting into someone’s body, you are performing something that can go terribly, terribly wrong – and everything is set out to try and minimise risk, so that everything is smooth, smooth, smooth; the right instrument at the right time, familiarity with everything, and everything that breaks it makes surgery impossible. I appreciated for the first time, fully, exactly how important the environment is, the supporting staff are, all the infrastructure that we have.   

Dinner was at a Chinese restaurant staffed entirely by Ghanians (though I caught sight of a couple of Chinese chefs vanishing into the kitchen) and I was asked to order for everyone, which was very fun, though being naturally Asian  I ordered far too much (“Connie, are you sure you aren’t Jewish?”) The menu was in Chinese and English and the food was great.

Wednesday, we went to a village in the eastern region, where everyone speaks Ewe (eh-way). I introduced myself, again to rapturous applause. This, it turns out, is because ‘Connie’ is short for ‘Comfort’ in Ghana, so everyone is familiar with my name.  I did some pretty mind-numbing data entry, and about a million visual acuities. Plantain chips for lunch, and I also got a lovely surprise in the evening – a phonecall from Tim! So nice to hear from him. 

Wednesday night was reggae night on the beach. Words cannot describe. A good time was had by all. 

And today - surgery again. Apparently this surgeon often goes on till 10pm at night, so wish me luck.

Much love to all of you, and missing you all here in Ghana

xxxx

Akwaaba!

Greetings from Ghana!

Or Akwaaba! (yes, said with an exclamation mark.) I am in Accra, Ghana, neglected country on the African itinerary, currently enjoying the world’s most feeble air conditioning, in a room where if you turn the fan on it makes a noise like it’s about to fall off onto the bed, and if you move the curtains the rail falls off, the floor is covered by sticky bits of faux wood that come off whenever you step on them and then track you around the room, and unusual insects keep on appearing out of BLOODY NOWHERE. I LOVE IT.

My overwhelming affection did not have an auspicious start. I  set off from Bognor Regis at the ungodly hour of 3am with a very chatty taxi driver who regaled me with his erectile problems (“I don’t mind telling you, as you’re a doctor” – lovely). I landed in Italy at 11:30 and had a stop over of about 2 hours during which I discovered I had forgotten all the Italian I ever knew apart from ‘vino rosso’ ‘prego’ and ‘grazie’. Turns out though that this is more Italian than anyone else knew on the flight over to Ghana and when I tried it out on the Italian steward he was so impressed with my linguistic know-how that he gave me the whole bottle of red wine*. This made for a very pleasant, though sleepy, journey.

*There was only 1.5 cups left in it – still, it was the rest of the bottle so that is my story and I am sticking to it.

On arrival in Ghana, there was the most almighty queue for immigration. Man alive it was hideous. I have never seen anything so awful. Somehow due to being so extremely short and self-effacing I managed to wind up almost at the very very back, just in front of a very cheerful man who was phoning his wife. He had a laugh like Santa Claus – “ho ho ho!” he said, “this queue is crazy my darling! I will be here for at least 2 hours! Ho ho ho!”

He was not wrong. I waited 2 increasingly sticky hours before having my passport stamped by a very cheerful immigration officer and then going through customs with another very cheerful customs officer who looked at my luggage tags.

Him: “Han?”

Me: “That’s me”

Him: “Beautiful Han!”

Me: “Stinky Han.”

Him: (as if this was the funniest joke he had ever heard) “Ho ho ho! Off you go!”

I wish Border Security (the TV show) was like this.

I was being picked up from the airport by one of the nurses from Unite for Sight, Jerome, another preternaturally cheerful person.

Jerome: “I knew it was you straight away.”

Me: “Ha! Is it because all Unite for Sight volutneers look exactly the same (scruffy hippy youngsters)”

Jerome: “Well, they always have two bags…one for the glasses, and one for them. And they always have a third bag. And that is always a rucksack.”

Profiled.

I finally arrived at my hotel just before midnight. In the middle of checking in, the receptionist started up from her seat.

“To me!” she cried, and rushed away.

I followed her immediately only to discover she had rushed to a toilet and had, remarkably quickly, removed her trousers.

Me: “Oh!”

Her: “Tummy!”

Me: “Right. Got you. Tummy. To me. Easily mixed up.”

I was then shown to my room, which was in the sad state as already described. Now, before I set off to Ghana, I was told to bring a bedsheet as ‘sometimes the sheets in hotels aren’t as nice as the ones you’re used to at home.’ Frankly I thought this was a hilarious load of balls – aren’t as nice?? - and clearly advice aimed at pathetic namby pambies, not stern, weather-beaten, hardened travellers such as I. 

So I didn’t pack any sheets. But I made the mistake of reading in my Ghana guide, just before I was to set off and far too late to make the necessary sheet provisions, the following:

“tumbu flies, or putsi, are a problem in Ghana. The adult lays her eggs on drying laundry, and when the eggs come into contact with human flesh (when you are lying on a bed), they hatch and bury themselves under the skin. Here, they form a crop of boils, each with a maggot inside. Smear a little Vaseline over the hole, and they will push their noses out to breathe. It may be possible to squeeze them out, but it depends if they are ready to do so as the larvae have spines that help them to hold on.’

As you can imagine, this unhappy passage left a deep imprint on my soul (as I’m sure it has left on yours, especially if you’re about to have dinner.)

So when I arrived at the hotel and switched the light on and something ran across the bed, my nerve failed me. I’m ashamed to say, I spread Tim’s travel towel over the sheet and my hoodie over the pillow and opened up my little mosquito tent net and crawled sadly in.

Also, there was no internet.

BOO.

So after a fairly uneventful night in which the cumulative effects of the air conditioning finally got cool enough to wake me at 3am – at which point I turned it off, as it has no temp control settings, only on and off – which means the heat woke me again at 7am – I woke up in a slightly grumpy state of mind.

But that was soon to change.

I had been told nothing about what I would be doing while here (obviously) apart from (on the day that I arrived), that there were 6 other volunteers all staying in the same place as me, who had all arrived earlier that day from the US. I wasn’t really sure how I felt about this. On the one hand, hurrah for not being lonely! 

On the other hand….6 volunteers from the US?

Turns out, the 6 volunteers were one ophthalmic consultant, one optometrist, and 4 ophthalmic nurses, who were all remarkably pleasant. Almost none of the ophthalmic nurses had ever been out of the country before and were amazed at absolutely everything they saw in Ghana. Ghana itself is a very pleasant country. It is not too crowded. It has good roads. The people are ridiculously pleasant and polite and friendly and all the best things you can imagine about people. The environment is pleasing. The climate is delightful (for an equatorial country). The food is very tasty. But the nurses were absolutely boggled at everything they saw and kept on exclaiming about all of it, which was funny because Ghana is really not that astounding, though I guess it would be astounding if you had never, ever left the US. They found lots of things very difficult – they really did not like the food, for one – and when I was leaving the place we were doing our outreach one of them literally ran after me shouting, “DON’T WALK OUT BY YOURSELF! IT’S NOT SAFE! YOU MUSTN’T!” – this at 3pm in the middle of a not very busy town, surrounded by children. 

The outreach itself was very interesting. Unite for Sight operates a lot of outreaches, and you can read more about it on Unite for Sight’s own website, which itself is a wealth of really genuinely interesting information about public health, grassroots initiatives, self sustaining projects, etc etc. Briefly though, there are outreaches almost every day to areas all around Ghana. During those outreaches the team sees an unholy number of patients and dispenses medication, glasses, or refers for surgery or further investigation, also sponsored by Unite for Sight. Fascinatingly, they don’t measure people for implanted ocular lenses here – they just plonk a standard +18D lens in – which obviously can lead to huge refractive errors. But since it’s better than being almost completely blind, and since the people coming to clinic never do close work anyway, it doesn’t matter. 

I saw a huge number of very advanced pathologies which I won’t go into here - some of the most advanced cataract you can imagine, end stage glaucoma, and a wide variety of retinal scars. All the patients waited remarkably patiently for their turn, and were ridiculously nice and friendly and all the rest of it. They all knew my name because, when we had to introduce ourselves in front of the whole assembly, the Users (esp the nurses) were all very quiet and humble and mumbly and also pronounced the Twi words in a very strong American accent and no one understood them and so their announcements were greeted with silence. Being the self effacing sort that I am, I thought I’d go for it. I was at the very end, and I stepped up and said very loudly, “Ye fre me Connie” to which there was a ridiculous and overwhelming response of “Akwaaba Connie! Sistah Connie!” and loud applause. Dennis, one of the Ghanian nurses, explained to the US contingent – “they are more used to British accents, you see.”

We worked through the day without a break for lunch and when we set off for home at around 4pm I was starving. We stopped on the way for dinner – I was very taken with the idea of having fufu, which is cassava, with goat stew, to which idea the vast majority of the US crew responded with horror, loathing and disgust. The consultant found this hilarious and thought he would have fufu with me, along with one of the nurses. The others opted for rice and chicken and though this arrived and looked very tasty, none of them seemed to enjoy it, trying their very best to eat it but picking at it in that dispirited way which can’t hide disappointment. The three of us who had fufu ate it traditionally – with our hands – having washed them first in a communal pot. The consultant went first, and then insisted I washed mine in the pot, and then made everyone else do it too.

Shower, then discovering the internet is well and truly buggered, but then discovering that the plugs here – heavenly! – are British ones! – and then upstairs for drinks on the patio with all the team, now considerably cleaner and more relaxed. One of the nurses manages to trick the consultant into thinking she’s brought some hash with a bag of kale chips (‘you are the coolest person I have ever met’), and a good deal of wine is drunk. 

Emei, Xiamen, Huang Shan, and back to the UK

11^th September

Today is the day for tackling Emei Mountain. Emei is one of the sacred mountains of China – it’s topped by a huge cupola and a 6-faced Buddha, on elephants, made of gold. We only have one day there and are very keen to see the whole thing. Everywhere we ask, though, we are told that we definitely can’t do the whole thing in one day, and we’ll miss the last bus, then we’ll be sad and cold and hungry and cry all the way home.

We decide to try and do the whole thing.

Someone else 'doing the whole thing' with more ease than we managed

We get up at 5:30am and eventually reach home again around 6pm. We have been assaulted by monkeys, beguiled by mist (that famous Buddha and those famous views? Nothing having) and generally our knees have been destroyed, but we have proven it can in fact be done in one day. We walked 44km down an infinite number of steps, and the next day, we can’t walk. In fact, I can barely get off the bed. Unfortunately, we are staying on the 3^rd floor in our hotel and therefore have to cringe our way downstairs, saying, ‘owowowowow’ and trying to walk sideways to save our knees. This is highly unsuccessful.

just a few of approximately 1000000000 steps we descended (and sometimes ascended)

So misty!

13^th September – Xiamen. We’re here to meet up with one of Tim’s friends from school, Kenny, who is of Singaporean/Malay extraction but actually hails from Worthing. He’s got a great Worthing accent. Kenny had to learn Mandarin on arrival in China 4 years ago but now speaks it fluently, though he says he still gets odd looks from people (China is a very monocultural country, and if you look Asian everyone will assume you’re Chinese), and has a Malaysian girlfriend who speaks every language under the sun – Malay, Hokkien, Cantonese, Mandarin, English. No room for French and Spanish and Italian and German in here!

Kenny is a keen kite surfer and teaches us to kite surf, on the beach. It’s really quite exciting and I soon have all sorts of ideas about kitesurfing when we move back to NZ. No luck though, Gisborne is a surfer’s paradise, which has quite different requirements from kitesurfing – i.e. waves as opposed to, well, no waves.  I suppose I’d better just concentrate on being a good surfer then. Like that’s so easy. 

20^th September – Huang Shan. Beautiful scenery, interspersed with some fantastic signs. We spend only 4 hours here, pottering up and down, up and down. The next day, our legs don’t hurt at all, which is a massive bonus as they only stopped hurting from Emei Shan about 1 day ago. We have learned our lesson.

We stay in a slightly crazy homestay raved over by foreign travellers. The host spends most of his time expounding about his life philosophy in Chinese to me and telling me not to marry Tim, as ‘foreigners get divorced like we order a hot dinner, just like that *snap*’ Me: ‘have you ever left China?’ him: ‘You don’t need to leave China to know what foreigners are like.’ Me: ‘hmmmmmm.’ Tim, on the other hand, comes away with the impression that our host is a super nice guy. This must be where all his great reviews come from. Foreigners who don't understand Chinese. 

21^st September – we stay in Shanghai, and we visit one of Tim’s friends, who manages to smuggle us into the Shanghai Jazz festival – lots of fun, and absolutely filled with ex-pats. We have an amazing falafel sandwich, which makes us unbelievably happy.

Earlier, we blow 500 yuan on a meal for two. Given that we have previously had dinner for under 30 yuan, this is an unconscionable expense. On the other hand, we were so desperate for western food and wine it seemed cheap at the price. We go to a restaurant run by a Hungarian chap  and even though it’s really not the best meal we’ve ever had…it’s the best meal we’ve ever had. Feel homesick for the western world.

22^nd September – back to Beijing, and we stay in a HuTong in Beijing – a lovely courtyard house. We do the usual things – the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, and all the rest. I am highly distracted however because now the exam really is very close, and Tim simply has hankerings for home. The rest of China is a bit of a daze.

We didn't really go, we just photoshopped Tim in front of this scenery

We fly back on the 28^th on Air Astana (!) with a brief pause in Kazakhstan (and some very enjoyable Kazakh reality tv). After a very, very long time in transit, I arrive home in Bristol – very smelly and tired, and proceed to sit in my room for a week in my pyjamas and without washing my hair, doing past papers and procrastinating by playing Hearts. I get very, very good at Hearts.

6^th October – my little sister moves into Christchurch! Tim arrives to help her move in. Christchurch is hideously ugly but I am touched by how excited she is, and I am excited too – this is the beginning of an amazing time for her in Oxford. We visit Magdalen and surprisingly there is a medic on the front desk who recognises us! Things have changed since we were last here – the porter’s lodge has been gutted and replaced by a sleek glass specimen, to which I am immediately and deeply opposed. And Longwall quad has entirely been dug up. Sad.

7^th October- FRCOphth part 1 in the London Welsh Centre. I’ve been waking up every morning at 7am in a panic, except this morning when I’ve spent far too much time talking to Kirsty the night before and now am extremely sleepy. There is an atmosphere of barely concealed panic in the waiting hall. Everyone looks so YOUNG – am I really also this young? Or are they all just-beginning F2s? Everyone is reading Elkington and trying to see what ray diagrams everyone else is looking at in Elkington or panicking over the fact that they haven't brought Elkington with them.

Exam over, I immediately join Ruth for a massive drink. Dinner with everyone in London and a wonderful catch up over lots of tasty Indian food, and a bevy of interestingly named cocktails (sadly not quite as interesting to drink as to read the menu) at Dishroom (which makes me think of a mushroom, sadly).

8^th October – I give myself over to frivolity completely.

9^th October - Buy pair of shoes taller than the Eiffel Tower. Also get lost looking for the Ghanian High Commission, ask for directions at an estate agents who, astoundingly luckily, has applied for a Ghana visa only a month ago and therefore was able to direct me to the right place (about an hour away – I was quite, quite lost).

We also buy Tim’s suit for the wedding, and a load of ties – very, very, very exciting! Tim has also been staying in Oxford and has had lots of important meetings and found out lots of important things. It really feels real that we are getting married now – which is very exciting indeed. I purchase a dress for my sister, and we start looking at invitations. I purchase a copy of Brides magazine.

Man behind counter: ‘oh, so you’re getting married!’

Me: ‘yes!’

Man: ‘gosh. When is that?’

Me: ‘next year.’

Man: ‘and you’re reading about it now?’

Yes, sir, yes, I am.

That evening, I go and watch the Bake Off with Liz and Kirsty. After 1 show, I am addicted. This show is stronger than heroin.

17^th October – a week of activity in Bognor Regis later, and we’ve ordered wedding rings, arranged meetings with florists (I never thought I’d see the day when I’d type ‘we’ve set aside around £200 for flowers – is this unreasonably cheap?’) I’m very excited about getting married. And very excited about Ghana. And also very excited about New Zealand. Excitement all round really. To quench over enthusiasm, I try to be very organised about life and reheel about a million shoes, which really is a good cure for excitement. Feel like I spend a whole load of my time reheeling shoes* – much like revision, I never seem to get to the end of it. Check up syllabus for FRCOphth part 2 for shits and giggles – wow. Just, wow. Not sure I will ever know what’s in that exam, especially as FRCOphth part 1 is fading unreasonably quickly. What was Avellino corneal dystrophy again?

*should make it clear really that I personally did not reheel any shoes. I brought them to Timpson's to be reheeled. And the reason it took so long was I kept on discovering new shoes in hitherto unseen places, all of which invariably required reheeling.

19th October - last day in the UK before Ghana....I have my mosquito net, I have my DEET, and I have at least two words of Twi. I am READY.  Taxi at 3am. Thanks so much to everyone who has supported with encouragement, donations, time - everything. You have all been wonderful, and I'll see you folks when I get back. :-) 

China continued - it just goes on

(it is a very big country after all, and I am trying to write it all down before GHANA)

4^th September – Guilin. Meant to be the most beautiful spot in China – a cruise down the Li river is probably what you imagine when you imagine a Chinese landscape: all those towering mountains in mist and a wide river between with bamboo rafts, water buffalo and cormorant fishermen all sharing the waterways. And also about a million Chinese tour groups.

This scenery is the exact scenery of the 20 yuan note

Tim experiences being in a Chinese tour group for the first time and heartily dislikes it. We get taken to a Buddhist temple where my father warns me not to touch the incense as otherwise the monks will charge you for it – they don’t charge you directly; burning incense is free, but if you burn incense, you also get a free ‘advice session’ with a monk where they tell you how bad your karma is and how much money you have to donate in order to help the state of your soul. It is all very contrary to Buddhism and Tim and I escape through a tower defence like maze of trinket sellers, including one turtle that the seller insists is 1300 years old (“touch it and you’ll have good luck!”) – this is an advance on a previous turtle we’d seen which was only 1000 years old. They seem quite sprightly for 1000 year old animals given that I understand the oldest turtle on record was about 250 years old and was not very well by the end of it.  Still, must have something to do with all that good karma that’s being paid for by all those tourists.

In the evening we go and see a spectacular light show actually set on the Li River.

 It rains. We get soaked. But it doesn’t matter, because we are going to the Giggling Tree for a rural respite for a few days. My parents go on back to Guilin, but we stay in Yangshou and go to a nearby village for some Dutch goodness.

6^th September – Waking up to the sounds of a Chinese family arguing passionately about something in the courtyard behind us. We are staying in Aishanmen village, which is about 4km from Yangshou. We’re staying at a beautiful restored farmhouse hostel which is owned by a Dutch couple, and staffed by an infinite series of young helpful Dutch managers. This is definitely my most lao wai experience in China yet – the courtyard is basically filled with grateful foreigners all drinking not bad coffee and having muesli and toast and enjoying how clean everything is, while still looking totally authentic. You can get oreo cookie milkshakes here, and burritos. This courtyard, my friends, is like me – a banana. A tasty tasty banana.

7^th September

We go on a very lovely picturesque bike ride around Yangshuo. At one of the bridges a lady attempts to get us to take her husband’s boat back down the river, and in order to ensure that we do take her husband’s boat, she trails us all the way to the next bridge, rather disconcertingly. We decide after all that we are not going to take a boat but instead will battle on, cycling around, and see some incredible scenery, but also get our bikes massively stuck in mud – the front wheel of my bike particularly decides it loves  accumulating mud and is much less keen on turning, which makes for decidedly slow going. I then get a puncture.

This is mud, my friends.

5 hours later, we stagger back in, tired, hot, punctured, sweaty, and to relax we go to the mud and hot water caves and plaster ourselves all over in mud. My swimming costume is never the same again.

9^th September

Chengdu, home of the giant pandas! We go and see the baby giant pandas (a giant panda is called a ‘big panda’ in Chinese, and a red panda is called a ‘little panda’ – so, what would you call a little big panda?) which are tiny, miniscule! A few weeks later on BBC news runs a feature on them. We are smug, as we have seen them before.

I am in love with the red pandas, which are so lovely – furry faces and lovely ears, and the softest tail imaginable.

Later on, we go and sample Sichuan opera, which involves a lot of face changing (very impressive) and some acrobatics involving chairs and tables, and a very silly play with a candle. We also sample Sichuan food which is indeed incredibly searingly hot but not as unavoidable as we’d been led to believe by others, and therefore have a lovely time.

****

So, China

25^th August. Leaving NZ is sad. We take our last photos from our balcony. We’ve spent the last weekend cleaning our flat (we decided to hire a cleaner: in what seems to be a recurring theme in our lives at the moment she said she could do it and then pulled out at the last minute.) which I really wish I never have to do again. I hate cleaning. Which is probably why the final clean of a rented apartment is quite that distressing since it represents months of studious avoidance. Goodbye, Palmy! Goodbye!

26^th August. Beijing. 1 hour flight from Palmy to Auckland then 3 hour wait then 12 hour flight to Shanghai then 5 hour wait then 2 hour flight to Beijing = TIRED Tim and Connie. No time to rest though as now time to meet my whole extended family in Beijing I haven’t seen for 9 years. Tim is about twice as tall as everyone there. Toasts all round. Beijing is smoggy and crazily over-developed – it bears almost no resemblance to the Beijing I saw 9 years ago. Apart from the spitting. And the smog, which is worse.  Even the traffic is better, though Chinese people drive like demons. Slightly terrifying and depressing – where has the old Beijing gone?

28^th August. Shiajiazhuang. The other side of my extended family! We ride the bullet train which takes us there in an hour – the old train took us there in 4. Very comfortable. Top speed 229km/h, which is not bad. Boarding the train in Beijing was insane – the biggest number of people I have ever seen trying to squeeze into the smallest space I have ever been in. Tim has a slightly panicked look in his eyes most of the time. He hasn’t learned to shove hard enough in crowds yet.

Shijiazhuang – my family overfeed Tim at every opportunity. Everyone is concerned he is wasting away. Tim’s most used phrase this week is, “no, really, I’m really full, thanks.” We go fruit picking and Tim tastes some Chinese grapes fresh off the vine – much tastier than the seedless variety.

We also eat the biggest pear in the world – it’s bigger than my head.

Doing an impression of that horse heart eating scene in GoT series 1

After that, we have to tackle another enormous lunch. Then it’s time for an afternoon nap. In the evening, my sister gets a perm and a straight cut fringe. It takes about 2.5 hours. Tim and I go along for moral support and teasing – I manage to revise a whole chapter of my ophthalmology textbook in that time.

1^st September - The bullet train again to Xi’an. Meet all of Tim’s friends from China made on his elective. Professor Dan, who is not Deng as Tim called him, insists on giving my parents a HUGE bag of extremely expensive tea. We invite them all out to dinner to thank them for looking after Tim so well when he went to Xi’an last time. Another day, another huge dinner.

Prof Dan makes long emotional speech about how he sees Tim as his son and is delighted he has got a Chinese girlfriend. Tim, under pressure, gets up to make extremely short speech in Chinese which goes, “I am very happy to be here with you and that you can come”, and then stops short as he has run out of words. Everyone comments on how thin he is and exhorts him to eat more. Tim says he is so full he literally cannot eat anything else. We also get a huge heart shaped box from Dr Wu with two tiny bowls inside, and a pair of chopsticks ‘to make sure you have a son quickly’. Dr Jia takes us out to dinner with her husband and daughter to a tiny kebab place where you can get literally anything on a stick. Literally. Anything. I’m talking cartilage and tendon (surprisingly tasty). And chicken feet. On a stick.

 Between us we drank 4 jugs of strong local beer. Dr Jia’s husband had a mug that stated ‘playboy of the year’ in Chinese, the translation of which was quite difficult as they did not know what ‘playboy’ was in English and I did not know what it was in Chinese (Dr Jia (in Chinese): “It signifies a young man who perhaps has a large number of girlfriends. Do you know what I’m saying? It is saying he is the champion of having a large number of girlfriends.” Dr Jia’s husband (in English): “I am champion!” Me: “A playboy?” Dr Jia and her husband (loudly, jointly in English): “A playboy!” – startling Tim, who hadn’t been paying much attention.)

Xi’an is in the west of China and is the terminus of the silk road. It’s an ancient city, with its ancient city walls still intact. Tim and I take a very bumpy, wobbly ride around the walls, intersected with frequent breaks for food.

We have lamb kebabs, and roujiaomou (Tim described them as delicious Chinese burgers in his blog last time), and soup dumplings (tangbaozi), and jiao zi, and lots of strange Chinese cakes which Tim finds worrisome and which I find taste of my childhood. Tim tells me that last time he came to China he used to always buy three things when he went out for food in the hope that one of them was edible. He says that now he’s here with me he no longer needs to worry about that. Then he hesitates and amends that to, “well, most of the time”, after I feed him a green bean paste cake that I insist is delicious and he insists is like eating savoury chalk. He grows to like this. He has a similar reaction to a drink my aunt introduced me to which I think tastes like delicious toasted brioche in liquid form. Tim disagreed. He loves the yoghurt though and also eats basically any dumpling that he can find. We are both fond of Tsingtao beer.

Pounding peanut brittle in Xi'an's Muslim quarter.

Soup dumplings! Filled with soup - and very difficult to eat with dignity

I’m quite exhausted from all the cultural changes in China. Tim says that he thinks he was more culture shocked last time as everything was new, but this time he has a different kind of culture shock as I’ve been translating what people have been saying to him, whereas last time he didn’t know what was going on most of the time. 

Our hostel in Xi'an is gorgeous, a beautiful little courtyard that costs us about 10 quid a night. In the evening, we go to see quite a spectacular light and fountain show - just the kind of thing Chinese people like, really, lots of noise and lights and cheesy classical music played very loud on synthetisers - and get ridiculously wet.

And, since we were in Xi'an, here's a picture of the Terracotta Warriors, since I think it's actually illegal to mention Xi'an without showing them.

to be continued...

Normal service has resumed

HELLO

And I’m back!

Back in a country with access to my blog and to facebook, and a gmail that works more than 50% of the time.

And I've done my FRCOphth Part 1.

Hurrah!

Sorry it’s been so long.

Dear friends, I left you somewhat precipitously some time before I left New Zealand, with no idea about what I was doing next, for the simple reason that I didn’t have a clue. To cut a long, very tortuous story short (relatively short, since whenever I tell this story I give in to air-clawing, hair-rending ranting), our plans in South Africa fell through despite African Health Placements, for whom I now cherish a deep resentment, promising us they would arrange a job for us. This is how it went:

Us: “Hi AHP! We’d like to work in SA for 6 months in 2014. How about that?”

AHP: “Sounds great. Here’s 1000000 pages of paperwork. We’re super short of doctors so it would be great to have you.”

 Hours and hours of paperwork later, a trip to a lawyer (which, to be fair, provided us with some special comedy moments), months of preparation, reading, and all the rest, and in February 2013, just as we were about to cinch the deal, we had this conversation on the phone:

Us: “HI AHP! So let’s talk about which hospital we’ll be working at!”

AHP: “Sure thing! We would suggest these ones, which given you’ll be working on a purely voluntary basis – “

Us: “Sorry what?”

AHP: “You’ll be working on a purely voluntary basis.”

Us: “No we won’t.”

AHP: “Yes you will.”

Us: “But you said we’d have a job.”

AHP: “Yes, a job in which you are paid nothing and expect you to work the same hours as a junior doctor being paid £35000 a year. Naturally you will also pay for your own accommodation and travel. As it is the South African government which pays your salary, and as they have plenty of money but not enough doctors in rural areas, and they are begging for doctors, you would think that having a pair of doctors for the standard price for 6 months would be an attractive option. New Zealand, which interestingly enough is not nearly in as much need for doctors as SA, accepts doctors for 3 month placements. But in our wisdom, we have decided that unless you can commit for a whole year, it’s not worth our charity bothering to help you find paying jobs, even though we don’t actually PAY YOUR SALARIES.”

Us: “Well, you might have MADE THAT CLEAR when we initially said we WANTED JOBS.”

AHP: “We thought it was obvious.”

Us: “It was NOT FRICKING OBVIOUS.”

AHP: “Oops. Oh well, guess you’ve ruined your year out now since you are now too late to apply for jobs back in the UK, and we won’t help you find jobs in SA, even though we have already helped you complete most of the paperwork for it so it actually doesn’t even MAKE ANY SENSE for us to abandon you right now, since we’ve already done most of the legwork! We are BASICALLY SHIT and STUPID.”

Sorry. See what I mean about the rant?

I feel like I ought to put in some kind of disclaimer here about how I’m sure AHP does lots of good work and all this but I actually feel still quite pissed off about the way they treated us, and not, I hope, just in an entitled POOR ME I WANT TO VOLUNTEER WHY WON’T THEY HELP MEEE. It wasn’t just us being obtuse either – one of our friends also applied to AHP and we warned him that they didn’t do paid work for under a year.

Him: “No – I said I wanted a job, and they said that would be fine. There was absolutely no mention of volunteering. Their whole site doesn’t even mention volunteering.”

Us: “Why don’t you check with them.”

A week later.

Him: “The bastards!”

I genuinely still don’t understand why a charity that purports to help place doctors in rural areas that are in need of doctors, where there are government funded places that South Africans don’t want to work in, and therefore FUNDED JOBS, that AREN’T FILLED, leaving people in need, refuses to help place doctors for less than a year. It makes no fricking sense. Also, I’m still well pissed off that they basically showed absolutely no consideration for applicants in terms of making their policy clear. All this does is encourage people to lie on their applications – ‘oh yeah, we’re going for a year’, and then resign halfway through. Which surely makes it harder for them to fill places and to plan ahead! So they’re shooting themselves in the foot.

I don’t care if they’re a charity. I hate them.

So ANYWAY, our dreams (and probably my karma, after that offload) lying in PIECES, thanks AHP, we were left casting about for something else to do. We decided to spend another year in New Zealand, starting in November 2013, with some travelling beforehand.

Well, that turned out to be another barrel of laughs. NZ applications for November didn’t open until June. We were supposed to get results by July. July came and went. August came and went. Frantic emails and phonecalls came and went. It was, of course, my fault – I was hanging on for an ophthalmology non-training reg position. Those two months were quite agonising – Tim and I rejecting one job after another – not in the same place as each other, not the job I wanted – until our options in New Zealand were 1 only – Gisborne or nothing. Gisborne had promised me they would get back to me by 25^th August, which was the day we were leaving the country. 25^th August came and went. We began to face up to the thought we might be unemployed next year – a state which, given we were going to China, then I was going to volunteer in Ghana, and then we were GETTING MARRIED, a well known DRAINER OF BANK ACCOUNTS, was somewhat un-ideal. Also, what about our CVs? Tim started looking into volunteering in Uganda (which is ironic in a way since we only embarked on this whole sorry saga because we didn’t want to volunteer in South Africa, since we thought we couldn’t afford to) and then locuming. Everything was grim. We sat around with faces like this L. We reworked our wedding budget (nothing doing – it was as cheap as we could make it and still actually have a wedding aka a celebration rather than an occasion on which everyone sits around wearing sackcloth and eating watered-down gruel with no seconds). We went on holiday in South Island – which was great, a long planned second half to our South Island adventure, and lots of it was wonderful and fun and beautiful – but it was overcast by our uncertainty about our future. We left New Zealand with no idea if we were coming back. We packed up all our stuff in suitcases so that if we never returned, we could pay for them to be sent on. Our visas lapsed. We wallowed about in China in a state of limbo. Everything then was limbo. I didn’t update my blog in NZ because I didn’t know what to say, “hello everyone, we still don’t know what is happening with our lives. In other news, the skiing was great this weekend (we’d bought season passes last year, when we thought we’d HAVE A JOB this year so we supposed we may as well carry on using them as a sorry filler for the EMPTINESS in our lives).”

And then –

-         

On 4^th September –

-          Gisborne emailed me with an ophthalmology reg job offer

JOY!

Frankly, after the months and months and months and MONTHS of waiting and thinking and making plan Bs, then Cs, then Ds, then chucking everything and having a nervous breakdown, it still doesn’t really seem real. Tim, by the way, of course has a GP offer from Gisborne during which he will be earning cashloads of cash. Lucky sod.

My mum: “Well I hope this teaches you a good lesson to be organised in time next time!”

Me: “OH MY GOD.”

So the saga which started really in 4^th year of medical school, which was when I decided I wanted to go to NZ and then SA, or perhaps more solidly in 2011, which was when I first contacted AHP to find out if we could go to SA, is finally concluded. We're going back to New Zealand, and then coming back to the UK and missing out SA altogether. I have a dalliance in Ghana, where I am going next week. And I promise to faithfully update my blog and let you know everything that's been going on in my life, for ever. 

Next installment: CHINA