Ride Up Mt. Coot-tha

After a few days of doing not much more than turning pages of a book – I am reading Three Worlds Gone Mad by Robert Young Pelton – I am getting really restless. The weather isn’t all that great, but I will have to go outside and do something.

So I hop on my bike and head toward Mt. Coot-tha, a hill just west of the city center. It’s a good climb to the top at about three hundred meters in elevation. I breeze through the familiar bike path along the Brisbane River, go through a couple of suburbs, and start the steady climb at the six-kilometer mark, according to my cycling computer. The climb isn’t that steep, just enough to make you aware that you are doing a good cardio workout. After six kilometers and a three-hundred meter climb, I reach the observation point with a nice view of Brisbane and the surrounding suburbs.

This is what the city of Brisbane looks like today:

This is what it looked like in February, 2003, when I came to Brisbane as a backpacker:

That’s quite a few more tall buildings just in the span of five years.

All that hard work to come up only means an exhilarating coast back down. The road, devoid of any cars, is all mine. I lean forward with hands just touching the brakes, and let gravity pull me along the surface of the road at speeds up to 55 kmph. In just a couple of minutes, I am at the bottom of the hill, back to where I started. And I continue on my leisurely ride home along the river.

What a good work out. Now that I’ve worked up an appetite, I can’t wait for dinner.

Tonight’s dinner: that old standby during my college days - rice, black beans, and salsa. Except this time, the rice is not instant rice, the beans are cooked and not out of a can, and the salsa is not from a jar – I made that yesterday.

Full Moon Cake

Around this time every year is the Mid-Autumn Festival in the Chinese culture. The exact date is the 15th of the eighth month – on the Chinese lunar calendar. So, just like Chinese New Year, that day shifts around every year, which means I have no idea when it is in any given year. All I know is that, for this year, the Festival has just passed. It still feels a little weird to have the Mid-Autumn Festival in the spring, but then again, it can’t be weirder than Christmas in the middle of summer.

The Mid-Autumn Festival, much like the Chinese New Year, is a time for families that have scattered all over the land to re-unite, feast together, and reinforce the familial bond. For families like ours in which one member of the family seems to move farther and farther away from home, that tradition has long ago died an unceremonious death, along with the family get-together during Chinese New Year, ancestral tomb sweeping during Qingming, and various other family activities that are, per tradition, spread throughout the lunar calendar year. Now we squeeze what activities we can into the couple of weeks every couple of years when my family actually gets together. During those couple of weeks, we’d make up for the reunions and family feasts we missed in the previous couple of years, visit the family grave plot, and do everything else completely out of season.

Okay, I am the guilty party in all of this. Whereas I used to be “only” at the other side of the country, now I am at the other side of the world from my family. My annual visits to my family are now taking place about every eighteen months. And now that, for several major reasons, I am planning on staying in Australia for good, we will have to make up for lost times every eighteen months or so. In the mean time, my mom will have to be content with my weekly phone calls.

Actually, the only reason I know that the Mid-Autumn Festival has passed was that, while picking up my ethnic grocery supplies at one of the Asian grocery stores in Chinatown today, I saw all those moon cakes on sale. I always have a soft spot for moon cakes, even though I can only eat about half of one before the sickly sweet cake becomes overwhelming.

This moon cake contains sweet red bean paste and a whole preserved duck egg yolk in the middle.

Happy Mid-Autumn Festival! Whenever that was.

Nine Down, Just One More To Go

Yes, it’s done! The exams are over! Now I have a week off.

Hmm, I forgot to plan something for next week. I guess I’ll have to sit around, twiddle my thumbs, maybe read a book, have coffee with friends, do some bike riding, and generally do nothing.

Yeah, that sounds like a plan.

I want It Over Already!

The rotation is coming to an end. Exams for this rotation are going to be in the next two days. I am at a point where the more I try to study, the more my knowledge seems to get all mixed up. All I am getting now is diminishing returns for my efforts. So, I am finished with studying. I’m going to put on a movie. Come on, exams, do your worst!

In Retrospect: Lhasa

When I spent a month in Tibet in 2003, it was during a period of relative peace when ethnic tension between the Han Chinese and Tibetans was at a lull. There were no major anniversaries of any uprising or suppression or riots. So tourists were allowed to roam around Lhasa unimpeded.

I flew in from Chengdu and, being at 3700 meters from sea level for the first time, immediate got altitude sickness. My head was pounding non-stop; I lost my appetite, and had to gasp for air even by walking from my hostel room to the toilet down the hall. Through the first night, I constantly woke up gasping for air. On the second day, it took me half a day to get out of bed. I had some food and felt a little better. I regained my appetite quickly and was able to walk around soon after that, but the headache persisted for a whole week.

Much of Lhasa consisted of the drab utilitarian buildings found in every other Chinese city. The Tibetan Quarter, with buildings bearing the characteristic white-washed walls and crimson trim, had now been reduced to an area clustered around the venerated Jokhang Temple. I went out on three separate trips to see other parts of Tibet and came back to Lhasa to wash, rest, and plan the next trip.

On the flight from Chengdu to Lhasa, the Himalayas below looked unnervingly close to the plane.

The Potala Palace, once the seat of Tibetan theocracy, is now a museum.

The Chinese made sure that everyone knew who was in charge.

The gilded roof of the Potala Palace shined in the sun.

The concrete square just in front of the Potala Palace

The ruins of the buildings just within the Palace compound was a reminder of the destruction carried out in the city in the last fifty years.

Looking out from top of the imposing Potala Palace

View of the White Palace


~~~~~~~~~~

Jokhang Temple was built in the seventh century by King Songtsan Gampo to celebrate his marriage to the Chinese princess Wencheng.

Flower pots on the windowsill

Vendors line the plaza in front of Jokhang Temple, with Potala Palace in the background.

The Dharma wheel flanked by two deer, the symbol of Tibetan Buddhism, is placed at the top of every temple.

Decoration on one of the bronze bells at the top of Jokhang Temple


Pilgrims come from all over the land to prostrate themselves in front of Jokhang Temple, often for hours at a time.

The worn-out padding used by a pilgrim for her prostrations

Pilgrims, and some tourists, waited in line to enter the main temple.

Thousands of lamps fueled by yak butter gave the air a buttery scent.

The kora around Jokhang Temple also served as a market that sold religious paraphernalia.

~~~~~~~~~~

Sera Monastery, one of three great university monasteries of Tibet, is situated in the outskirts of Lhasa.

Crimson-robed monks participating in debates

Solar power at its finest

Norbulinka, just a couple of kilometers down the road from the Potala Palace, was the summer residence of the Dalai Lama when he ruled Tibet.

One of the buildings in the Norbulinka compound and its neglected yard

~~~~~~~~~~

The front gate of this house near the Norbulinka hints at the wealth of its inhabitants.

Trunks for sale

Always circumambulate a temple counterclockwise, and spin the prayer wheels in the same direction.

Just taking a rest

Playing chess on the sidewalk

I saw outside an electronics store this advertising poster featuring none other than Arnold himself touting a machine to help students learn a foreign language. Hmm, did Arnold use it to learn English?

The sleeper bus I boarded to leave Tibet

Ethical Minefield

I visited an in vitro fertilization (IVF) clinic today as part of our OB/GYN rotation. I am aware of the debate around assisted fertility – Should people who are infertile for whatever reason be able to use technology to achieve pregnancy? Should the government allocate any resource for assisted fertility? Isn’t infertility natural selection in play – that people who are infertile are not meant to pass their genes to the next generation? Are we interfering with evolution by providing the means for those people to achieve pregnancy? – but with the IVF clinic visit, I came to realize a whole broadened range of ethical issues beyond the rationale behind the use of IVF.

Okay, this is an IVF clinic, the people working here and the patients probably all have looked past the ethical issues of using IVF. But IVF comes with a slew of new ethical issues. Each IVF cycle produces a number of embryos; the guideline allows only one to be implanted, so the rest of them are frozen for five years. After that, the couple needs to make a decision on what to do with them – keep them frozen for another five years or let them thaw (and die). What if a couple splits during that time? Does each parent have custody of half of the embryos? What if the father gives custody of all of the embryos to the mother? Will he still be liable for child support if the mother then decides to have a child using one of the embryos? Just when the law and guidelines are interpreted to provide a solution to a scenario, more what-ifs can come up, each one pushes the ethical and legal boundaries and contributes to the minefield that can potentially blow up in the faces of doctors and patients.

One of the doctors told us that, after working in the IVF for a while, he came to realize that everyone needs to come to terms with each ethical dilemma that may arise with every decision. On the issue of when life starts, he has come to the conclusion that life does not always start at conception. Like with natural conceptions where chromosomal abnormalities are the most common cause of first-trimester miscarriage, a good percentage of the eggs fertilized via IVF technology contain chromosomal abnormalities and thus not viable for implantation. Not all eggs and sperms are created equal and, due to de novo mutations, not all embryos are created equal. To someone who believes absolutely that life begins at conception, the number of embryos destroyed for that reason alone would make the place seem on par with abortion clinics, not to mention the thawing of all the frozen embryos. Clearly, one would have to become a moral relativist to be able to work in this field.

Bring Down the House

Te, te Deum laudamus;
Te, te Dominum confitemur:
Te aeternum Patrem
omnis terra vene ratur.

For the last two weeks, I have been humming this opening phrase and other segments of Haydn’s Te Deum. They just form a loop, playing over and over in my head, whether I am reading, commuting, showering, sitting on the toilet, or even watching surgeries. Whenever I am not concentrating one hundred percent on what I am doing, this soundtrack wedges its way through to the front of my brain and starts the automatic loop. I must look like a lunatic on the bus sometimes, staring out the window with my head bobbing and feet tapping, but without the ubiquitous headphones sticking out of my ears.

I sing in the bass section of The Queensland Choir and, like what happens three or four times a year, it’s around concert time again. This time, we are doing Haydn’s Te Deum and Puccini’s Messa di Gloria. With rehearsals twice a week for a month before concerts and increasing familiarity with the music, it is inevitable that the music becomes a temporary fixture in the jumble of information swirling around my head. The music is beautiful and I really enjoy singing it, but having it played in a continuous loop can become a drag. Mercifully, I tend to be able to file it deep into the recesses of my mind after each concert so it does not become a nuisance.

Last Sunday we went down to Bangalow, New South Wales, just inland from Byron Bay, to do the Puccini piece to a full house. It was good to see in the audience a good number of dark spots in the sea of silvery white hair. I know, performances of classical music, with its formal, stiff-upper-lip settings, traditionally high-brow and inaccessible attitude, and strictly no interaction between the audience and performers and no improvisation, can hardly pose any threat to rock concerts. For our concert, we performed at a small Catholic cathedral with the audience filling every pew. With the warm afternoon glow streaming through the windows, we rocked the house. Well, as much as one can rock with classical music.

Our concert tomorrow will be in the Cathedral of St. Stephen in the middle of Brisbane. I am sure we will follow last weekend’s performance and bring down the house once again. What’s the music equivalent of “break a leg”? Strain a vocal cord?

Qui tollis peccata,
peccata mundi
suscipe deprecationem
deprecationem nostram…