In Retrospect: Grand Canyon National Park

September, 2002: my first drive across the US. My sister and I went to Europe for a couple of weeks, then drove from Washington, DC, to Fresno, California. We crossed the Deep South and dodged a hurricane. In the last stretch of the two-week drive, we stopped at Grand Canyon in Arizona for two nights. The mornings and nights were chilly at that elevation, and early October meant the low season, so the crowds were small. We got up early to watch the sunrise, twice. We did little walks down the canyon, but didn’t go far.

The Grand Canyon is in the northwestern corner of Arizona.

Sunrise over Grand Canyon

It was a hazy day. We learned from the Visitor Center that the westerly brought smog from Los Angeles to Grand Canyon from time to time. Today was one of those days. Thanks, Angelenos.

Standing at the precipice along the South Rim

The Abyss

The Canyon changed color as the day went by. The setting sun gave everything an orange glow, despite the bluish haze.

The next day, we got up early again to watch the sunrise at a different spot.

Being at the top of the canyon, there is not much with which to frame the sunrise. These couple of dead trees would have to do.

The haze from the day before was still hanging around.

Riverfire

There is some kind of festival going on in South Bank. On schedule tonight is fireworks over the Brisbane River and a fighter jet from the Royal Australian Air Force doing some kind of dump and burn maneuver over the city. It happens every year; but I never bothered to go and watch it before.

But tonight, I strolled down to Kangaroo Point, found a spot with a good vantage point and not completely blocked by ten layers of people, and strapped my camera to the railing to take a few snaps.

Wooh, pretty fireworks. Is it just me or is Brisbane’s skyline really bland?

Brisbane Bound

Four weeks came and went in Hervey Bay. It has been busy but also very productive. I caught all four babies. The consultants and PHOs have been refreshingly nice to us and the teaching was excellent. So, I am leaving Hervey Bay feeling that the subject of obstetrics and gynecology is much more under control than four weeks ago. I don’t think I can expect clinicians in Brisbane to give me as much attention in the next four weeks.

Good bye, Hervey Bay. You have been good to me.

In Retrospect: Beijing

After my first-year elective in Wenzhou, China, at the end of 2005, I made a little side trip to Beijing to visit a couple friends. It was around Christmas time and the sky was miraculously clear during my stay. The high-pressure system that rolled in from Siberia cleared the smoggy air, and the trade off was that it got COLD! For a couple of days, I was walking around in temperatures of minus six degrees Celsius as the daily high. Everyone burned coal for cooking and heating and so, almost everywhere I went, the sulfurous stench of burning coal hung in the air.

I dutifully hit some of the must-see places: Tian Tan, the Forbidden City, and the Great Wall. In the mean time, I filled up on the unassuming, hearty local fares, got lost in a few of the remaining Hutong on a rented bike, and sharpened my bargaining skills at the Silk Market.

A couple of policemen standing next to the entrance to Tian Tan, otherwise known as the Temple of Heaven. The main temple was closed for renovation, a recurring theme at many of tourist attractions during the low season.

The studded bright red gates opened to the causeway to the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests in the distance.

This conjoined twins-like pavilion was a popular spot for locals to rest and exchange gossip.

View of one of the gates through holes of a cast iron urn.

Long corridors like this connect different temples inside Tian Tan Park. This one was the place where local retirees came to play chess, do their knitting, or practice their Peking opera.

Standing guard in front of Tiananmen Square under the watchful eyes of The Chairman

One of the smaller gates of Tiananmen

One of the pair of stone lions standing guard in front of the Hall of Supreme Harmony

Handles on one of the giant bronze urns placed throughout the Forbidden City. These urns were used for holding water to put out fires.

Blue Sky, Red Wall, Bronze Urn

Getting lost wandering around the maze of corridors is a guarantee. Each one of the 9999 rooms in the Forbidden City has its own history.

The low afternoon sun cast a shadow of the decorated roof ridge from an adjacent building on the wall of this one.

Reflections

The cracked paintjob on this heavy door was starting to show its age.

The sun was out, but it wasn’t working. I was wearing every item of clothing I had.

In the late afternoon, people started to stream down the long lane between two courtyards.

Leaving the Meridian Gate

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I did a 10k walk on the Great Wall from Jinshanling to Simatai. The terrain ranged from easy walk on flat and well-maintained sections of the wall to scrambling up vertigo-inducing steep and dilapidated sections.

Along the way, hawkers followed us and tried to sell us postcards and other souvenir. This being the dead of winter, farmers from villages along the wall took to selling trinkets for extra income.

Taking a break after one of the steep climbs

View through a window in a watch tower

The weak sun laid low on the southern sky the whole day, giving the brown hills and the wall a forlorn appearance.


A section of the wall that had not been rebuilt – not recently anyway

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I rented a bicycle and rode aimlessly along the maze of lanes through old neighborhoods that had not been torn down. Many of the hutong I saw were crumbling, damp, cold, and lacked plumbing. As much as we decry the demise of these traditional dwellings, I wouldn’t be surprised if the residents would prefer to live in bright high-rise apartments.

An elderly man pushing his cart down a lane, seemingly oblivious to the fast-changing world around him

Banana Vendor

Tiny eateries packed tightly together along a small lane. Many of them consisted of no more than a couple of small tables in the front room of a family’s home, but the food they served was cheap, delicious, and filling.

Brightly lit and frequented by the well-heeled, Wangfujing is one of the premier shopping centers in Beijing.

At Panjiayuan Market, Mao statues seemed to be one of the hot-ticket items.

Hutong Scene 1

Hutong Scene 2

This Muslim eatery, just down the block from my hostel, served delicious breakfast. The locals loved it too.

Drying Vegetables

Coal, the main fuel used by a lot of people living in hutong, was still distributed by people pedaling flatbed tricycles.

Oh, Baby Baby

A major requirement for this rotation is that each student has to catch four babies. My experience with catching babies runs as deep as the one time when I helped out the midwife at a birth at the beginning of last year on my rural rotation. Unlike a lot of things in my medical training so far, like taking history and doing physical examination where we practiced over and over until we were blue in the face, we are stuck straight into it when it comes to delivering babies.

But I learned. The midwives were there to coach me on delivering the babies while coaching the mothers on breathing and pushing techniques. I realized that a major part of delivering babies, from the perspective of the midwife, med student, or doctor, is like cheer-leading, sans pom poms. When the contractions during the first stage become too painful for the mother, I offer her nitrous oxide and instruct her to breathe through each contraction. When the mother is exhausted and thinks she can’t push anymore, I follow the midwife and encourage her to push – with a calm voice. As one of the midwives put it, catching the baby in itself is the easy part. A lot of the work goes into what you do for the patient before and after the birth – anything from getting drinking water for the patient to wiping her bottom after a series of hard pushing, from helping the patient get into positions that might be a bit more comfortable to getting her warm blankets, it’s all part of the job. Of course, the medical side of things like taking her obs, documenting the progress of labor, and pain management has to be attended to constantly.

At the end of the day, seeing a healthy baby cooing in the arms of the exhausted but relieved new mother would bring a smile to anyone’s face, even if it’s two in the morning.

Done Deal

I logged onto the Queensland Health website and there it is: two buttons. Accept – Decline. I slide the mouse cursor back and forth between the buttons.

Click.

Since Friday, I have been waiting to see if there is anything that tells me I should accept Queensland over New South Wales while all along, the nomad in me has been winning the argument. As far as the hospitals themselves are concerned, one is bigger than the other, but each has its advantages and disadvantages, so on that regard, it’s a wash. My gut feeling tells me to go for Wollongong. I know, it’s quite a big decision to make on gut feeling. It’s also a decision that may influence what road I go down in the future. Acting on gut feeling has served me well before; it has gotten me out of potentially sticky situations as well as steered me down the right path in the past. So once again, another major decision in my life is made.

The screen now reads “Logan Hospital: declined”.

Here I come, Wollongong.

Tape-Delayed Live Coverage

Last night’s Olympics opening ceremony was really impressive. I know, I watched it live on TV.

So this morning I called my mom in California and asked her what she thought of it.

“Don’t know, we can’t watch it until tonight.”

“What? What do you mean?” I was incredulous. How on earth wouldn’t NBC broadcast it live like every other country on earth? “What about on the satellite dish?” I asked.

“No, couldn’t watch it. I even got up at 5 this morning [which would have been 8 pm Beijing time] and tried to see if it was on TV, but it wasn’t on, not even CCTV [the Chinese channel from mainland China].”

I went online to see why that would be. Wouldn’t you know it, NBC, which has the exclusive rights to broadcast the Games, had decided to delay showing the opening ceremony by twelve hours so it would be shown during prime time in the US.

Well, with the internet these days, people can just go online and watch it, right? Wrong! NBC has borrowed a page on information control from the Chinese government’s playbook. As this article on the New York Times described, NBC took down unauthorized videos of the ceremony from host servers and used geographic blocking technology to limit the best they could the number of videos that could be accessed from the US. The reason they cited was the $1 billion of advertising revenue at stake.

The Chinese government has gotten a bad rap for their internet censoring, their control of the flow of information for the purpose of maintaining political power. They have caught a lot of flak for it, and I think they should. But this is the first time I have heard of any organization in the West, be it governments or NGOs or corporations, so openly control the flow of information, albeit for a different purpose – commercial gains. Okay, the information at stake here is a show, not dissenting voice. But does it mean that it is okay to control the flow of information for commercial purposes, for profit? Is a corporation’s restriction on people’s access to information in order to gain commercial profit any more benign than a government’s restriction on access to information in order to maintain power?

I should have told my mom the little secret for accessing “unauthorized” websites I learned from local college students while I was traveling in China: proxy servers.

Decision 2008

Queensland Health called me today and offered me a job for next year. It’s in a suburb between Brisbane and the Gold Coast.

Western Australia sent me an email – no deal.

South Australia: not a peep. No email, no phone call. I guess I should put them in the “No” column.

So now the choices for internship are between Logan, Queensland, and Wollongong, New South Wales.

On one shoulder, the nomad in me tells me to run with Wollongong: it’s time for a change of scenery. Brisbane is so four years ago. Go to a new and exciting place, make new friends, start a new life! Wollongong is only ninety kilometers south of Sydney, just think of all the culture you can access. The beach is within walking distance from the hospital. With all the national parks around the city, you won’t feel trapped.

On the other shoulder, the settler in me tells me: with Logan, you can live in Brisbane or the Gold Coast. The commute won’t be long either way. The move will be a piece of cake. You’ll be closer to your friends. The pay is better in Queensland. You’re already thirty-one, do you still really want to move around all the time? Is being able to fit all your worldly possession inside your car still something you want to boast about?

I think I will give the two of them some time to fight it out. I have until next Wednesday to decide on which position to take. Maybe I will have some kind of epiphany between now and then that will help me make a decision. Maybe.

In Retrospect: Paris

I know, Paris, yawn.

Paris, the City of Light, the city that has been photographed to death, was not the most imaginative place I visited on my travels. It, however, was the first place I visited at the beginning of my two years of on-and-off nomadic life before medical school. The time was September 2002, when I had a few more dollars in my bank account, before the US dollar embarked on its spectacular nosedive, and before I had any real experience living out of a backpack. Armed with my first digital camera, a compact Minolta F100 point-and-shoot, my sister and I joined the throngs of other tourists and canvassed the tourist sites, photographing them at different times of the day.

Yes, the stereotypes were all true – the wine was cheap, the food was good, the portions were tiny, and the waiters were rude. We were told in no uncertain terms not to touch the oranges we wanted to buy at a street market, we were accosted by slick street salesmen at Montmartre, we almost became victims of a mugging in a Metro station. Yet even with all that, it was hard not to like Paris.

These pictures probably look familiar, that’s because there is not one inch of Paris that has not been photographed a million times. But these are special, they are MY pictures.

Street scene in the middle of Paris

Over a hundred years on, Hector Guimard’s timeless Art Nouveau metalwork still framed Paris’ Metro entrances ever so elegantly.

A detail shot of the front façade of the Cathedral of Notre Dame

Tourists’ hushed voices reverberated throughout the inside of Notre Dame

What an impressive combination of the chandelier and stained glass window!

Various saints flanked the spine of the roof

Gargoyles in different guises and poses guarded the cathedral against evil spirits.

View of the Pantheon from top of Notre Dame

A closer look at the Pantheon

Looking across the tranquil courtyard of the Great Mosque of Paris

Colorful ceramic mosaic covered the ground and walls

Another courtyard of the Mosque provided an oasis in the concrete jungle

Le Basilique du Sacre Coeur sat atop Montmartre

The columns at the top of Sacre Coeur framed the panoramic view of the city



I.M. Pei’s pyramids created a perfect counterpoint to the French Renaissance and Baroque architecture of the Louvre.

The main pyramid served as the entrance to the Louvre.

The cold, geometric steel and glass pyramid, set against the warm and ornate stone façade, all reflected in the pool in the still of the night.

Multi-lanes of traffic encircled the illuminated Arc de Triomphe.

We went round and round up the narrow spiral staircase to the top of the Arc.

From top of the Arc, looking down the brightly lit Les Champs-Elysees and over to the ever-present Eiffel Tower

Just imagine living in the shadows of the Eiffel

Light and music show from the Trocadero

Try not to strain your neck

Just had to pay homage to Jim Morrison

We didn’t even check the guide book to make sure that Versailles was open before we headed out there. And sure enough, the palace ground was the only thing open the day we went.

So we had to make do with looking at the massive garden behind the palace.