the road to santiago

i went from tacna, peru to arica, chile to santiago, chile. the whole thing took me about 36 hours. i got in last night and i was tired. and my butt hurt. but now i'm here this morning, and it's a wonderful city. plus, i found a very quiet place to stay, and i slept until 8 this morning. which is basically unheard of in the world of jeremy. especially the traveling world. here are some pictures.

in addition to parisian towers, gustave eiffel was evidently a pretty big fan of making fountains. he made this one in tacna AND another in a small town in peru, and some others in south america (argentina) and europe (at least portugal). in the background is their cathedral.






the atacama desert is the driest place in the world. they probably have some sophisticated technology to determine things like that (although if it's just a plastic rain gauge i guess that wouldn't surprise me too much, either), but i can tell you that just by looking at the place.


i rode through the whole thing, and now i know: deserts are beautiful. and boring.







only one of those words, though, applies to oceans. and i don't think i could call anything that violent "boring", so there you are.






for some reason, i imagine that many people who read this blog are elderly. for this entry i can see the husband of the couple reading and then shouting to his wife "eunice! now he's even posting about his BUS rides!" surely even the elderly have their limits of interest. (i also occasionally imagine my mom cringing at my jokes). sorry if this is boring, but if you look at a map you realize how much ground i covered to get to santiago. so i thought i'd put something up.

i now have three weeks to get to buenos aires (while you've got your map out you can appreciate how much ground i have to cover in that time, too) to meet my mom. i don't really have a plan for what i'm doing in chile. but it'll probably be awesome. and better than the bus rides to get there.

arequipa and colca canyon

the last several days i've been in arequipa and on a trek into colca canyon. arequipa wins best city in peru honors--it's a very cool college town in the south of peru with its own style of architecture (arequipeña) characterized by the use of white volcanic rock found near here and a fusion of indigenous and spanish colonial styles. also, there is an enormous 500 year old monastery here which was very cool. obviously i'm getting ready to show you pictures.

this is the plaza de armas. that building there is the cathedral here. as you might guess from the palm trees and all, it's much warmer here, because it's a little lower in altitude. unfortunately this picture doesn't really capture the plaza, which many people say is the best in peru. (i just say that every once in awhile in case the readers aren't as impressed by my pictures as i hope they'll be. "it's like this, but waaaay better.")

for a mildly interesting picture, find a series of arches, stand at the end of them, and take a picture. your friends will definitely be impressed. this is another shot of the plaza.




this is the arches theory applied to the interior of the monastery, where it is apparently almost impossible to take a bad picture.






see what i mean? it's just two doors, but the colors are pretty. pretty much the whole monastery was done in that purple from above, this red, and then the white of the volcanic rock.




i've never entered into the monastic life (or for that matter been catholic, a nun, or a woman), but i imagine if i were to do so, i'd probably want mountain views like this if i was going to lock myself away from all human contact forever. i bet it'd help my contemplation and stuff. incidentally, this monastery used to be a very high-class place, where only the wealthiest people ended up to save their sins and perhaps the sins of their family. it was really quite posh, which is sort of contrary to the whole idea, until much later when a new person came to power and reformed up the place. at which time several nuns lost their interest in and dedication to contemplation of God, and left for less restrictive lifestyles.

this is a classic example of arequipeña architecture: note the volcanic rock (called sillar), the façade, and the decorations featuring local flaura and fauna and phenomena, like a snake coming out of a puma's mouth. i've never actually seen this happen, but i understand it's quite common in the deep amazon. you'll have to take my word for it. (it's way cooler in person!)





let's skip ahead to the canyon. here's me standing in the middle of it. that wall in the background reminded me and this swiss guy trekking with me of organ pipes. colca canyon was first considered the deepest canyon in the world, and then a nearby canyon was found to be 200 meters deeper. and THEN they found an even deeper part of colca canyon, so it got its title back, at something over 3500 meters from top to bottom (more than twice as deep as the grand canyon). this information makes me think that each canyon has a campaign team working around the clock to either find deeper spots in their respective candidates' geography, or using shovels and things to make the canyon a liiiittle bit deeper. stay tuned for developments, there may be a new deepest canyon this decade!

one part of the canyon is called cruz del condor, and here you can come every morning to see approximately four thousand condors coasting on rising hot air. before i came here i sort of felt bad for peru. their national symbol is both ugly AND it eats dead things. i'd take a bald eagle any day, which is both irrefutably awesome AND super cool. but it turns out when they're flying they're actually quite graceful. and they're enormous. so i guess it's an ok national bird. also of note, at this point in the canyon it's 3400 meters from the river to the top of the mountain on the in this picture. we're about half way up on our side of the river.




at cruz del condor they fly very close overhead--you can even hear the air whilsting through their feathers. watching these condors was a really amazing experience (and i came skeptical)--you actually see them from above, and can see their heads looking around for food.



that's all for now, then. today i leave arequipa for tacna, which is the border crossing to chile. and then i'll get on another bus (for 30 hours--probably actually not better in person) that will take me to santiago. so unless something really amazing happens on the bus, i probably won't have any exciting pictures other than of the atacama desert. so there's always that to look forward to.

except for this picture, which is on the ground here in arequipa. it's for everyone, but maybe especially for one person who might guess who she is.

best name for a lake EVER

i'm going to try to keep this blog up to date on all of the latest photo-op moments south america and i have. to that end, here's my last couple days, on lake titicaca. do you recall that the lake is the highest navigable body of water in the world? to be exact, it sits at 3.8 km above sea level. and it is massive--over 8000 square kilometers. i took a tour that let me visit two of the main islands as well as some of the floating islands and spend the night with a family. here are some pictures.

the first place we visited were the islas flotantes de uros, or the uros floating islands. the story is that a long time ago these crazy incans were coming along and crushing all non-incan socities in their way. so the uros decided on the perfect plan to save their culture: they piled reeds on top reed roots until they had themselves some floating islands.
the incans probably saw the uros solution and decided when you want to rule an entire continent you have to pick your battles, and that maybe they'd be better off without the people who came up with that brilliant solution in their empire. unfortunately, their plan totally backfired many years later in the face of the great cultural flattener and equalizer: tourism. so now they just sit around floating on the water while they wait for tourists to come and buy things made out of reeds. the tourist industry has much lower standards than the incans did.


here's the sun setting over the lake. the mountain peaks in the background are one of the things that make being there so surreal. you feel like you're just at sea level, but then in the distance you see snow-capped mountains. unfortunately they don't show up well here. tell you what...take me out to dinner when i get back and i'll show you some other pictures.


another really fantastic thing about the altitude at titicaca is the clarity of the air. you feel like you're standing in one of those weird thomas kinkade pictures where light is doing way more than physics actually ever lets it. maybe if the "painter of light" painted lots of pictures on lake titicaca they'd actually seem realistic. maybe.

at the top of the island is a temple. if you stand in the right place you can get a picture of the door, some girl you don't know, and the moon, all at once. it's not as hard as it sounds, see?









this is the family i stayed with. and their house. and some more kinkade light. the little girl, maribel, was really cool. the night before there was a big town dance and she and i tore up the dance floor with some really good nine year old dance moves.



here's one more shot of me and the lake and mountains. and my water bottle and bag. i really like how dumb i look in this picture.






ok, so that's all for now. i'm currently in arequipa (fire up google earth if you want to see where that is), my last stop before chile. in the next couple days i'll head off to colca canyon for some more hiking and sight-seeing, and then i'll move south. i have to be in buenos aires in one month, so i think i may skip through chile relativly fast to spend more time in argentina, which i'm expecting to really really like. ok, until the next update!

cuzco, cusco, qosqo

janae and i went to machu picchu, and it was fun and great and excellent. we did not do the incan trail, but rather took an alternate trek that was much less crowded and full of mountain views. here are some photomographs.

this is cusco's plaza de armas. with a sunset. and me and this girl i know. and a cathedral and church in the background. yup, that's this picture.






just to the side of this picture is a sign that says "you must be this tall to climb salkantay mountain". our guide let us in anyway when we gave him a candy bar.





here's our guide domingo showing us how to sneak around the gate, post candy bar. he was very accommodating. and cold. we were all very cold. (domingo is actually a very small man inside that puffy coat.) i think we might have actually taken this picture for the mountain in the background. but this candy bribery story is pretty compelling.


look, it's everyone's favorite jeremy and janae pose! if you all would like prints of this picture, ask janae. but if you want a super awesome hat like hers you'll have to ask her brother in law--she just borrowed it.




it probably looks like the lens was blurry in these photos. but really, it's just that beautiful up here...everything has an aura.






this is the famous sunrise over the sacred city. some people think the mountains in the background look like a guy's head. i guess i see it, but it seems to me like looking out the windows of the louvre to see a cow in the clouds when the mona lisa is right there.



be honest. did you look at machu picchu or my butt first? it's ok, you can tell. let's let the comments section be a support group. seriously though, don't laugh at me until you've tried the pastries here. i tried to stop, but i couldn´t!!!




here's janae and me and the guide in the ruins. i know what you're thinking--yes, domingo did totally try to get between j and me every chance he got. and yes, janae was always very abusive to him about her being taller.




here's the aerial view of machu picchu from huayna picchu. incidentally, this is also the picture i'm going to put up on lots of dating service websites if things between janae and i fall through. come and get it, ladies!!!

musings on museums

my time in lima is now just about over. tomorrow morning janae and i fly to cusco for hiking and blistered feet. i've really enjoyed being here, and had some fun and interesting experiences. yesterday was museum day, so i went to several (sorry jenna, but i did not make it to the pornographic pottery palace). i went to the history of peru museum, which has a bunch of artifacts from all (or many) of the pre-colombian groups that have lived around here. i always think those things are interesting--it's crazy to think about those people, and how much they had to discover just to survive, etc. it sort of makes you see yourself as part of a huge story, the continuing and slow development of a species from hole diggers to space explorers and on to wherever we'll get next.

i also went to the museum of gold, which was a much bigger deal until about 5 years ago when lots of the artifacts there were discovered to be fakes. the museum seems to have never recovered its self-esteem, and hasn't gone to the trouble to rearrange itself since they removed the fraudulent pieces so there's just a bunch of blank spaces in the cases, and it was sort of depressing. but they still have a ton of gold things there, and it was definitely interesting.

as per dan wink's recommendation, i went there to see the museum of weapons that is also included in admission to the museum of gold, and it was pretty cool. this place is a lot like your gun-crazy uncle's garage would have looked if he'd succeeded in accruing about about a million weapons and had been friends with leaders of nations and they all gave him pistols and swords as gifts. or if your uncle was ted nugent. they had these glass cabinets just stuffed full of weapons--rare, bizarre, or...nazi--without any apparent effort either at making it understandable or presentable or anything. mannequins who had no doubt hoped to one day be models for calvin klein or maybe even versacci looked a little broken and disappointed to be showing the 1960's styles of the nicaraguan army. it made me think of zoolander.

as much time as we as the human species have spent perfecting things like making ceramic pots (especially depicting sexual activities), irrigation, the creating and controlling of fire (thank you once again, tom hanks), we have spent probably a lot more time finding better or more interesting ways to kill each other. you can pretty much tell it's our favorite thing to do. i have no idea if putting the museum of gold and the museum of weapons on different floors of the same building (located in south america, no less) was intended as one of those sad but ironically funny gestures by the curator, but i guess i thought it was. sad and funny and ironic, i mean. maybe more sad. other chances for geography to be funny would be the chocolate museum with the historical society of fat people, or greenpeace's offices across the hall from texaco. or make up your own!

anyway. hooray for lima, hooray for peru. to infinity and beyond!

the bus to lima

ok, so i´ve made it to peru! i took a 100% sleepless bus from quito to guayaquil and got there around 6am. my lonely planet guidebook (remember, the one that lies?) told me a bus would go from guayaquil to lima at 2pm, so i went into town to watch the ecuador gam and have a look around. (and get breakfast!) i did that, and was walking around the very hot and humid city when i decided (at 11:25) i should go check on that bus, since lonely planet is so often wrong. i grabbed a taxi and went to their terminal only to find that ACTUALLY buses leave at 11:30. the bus was completely loaded, but hadn´t left yet, so i ran like the dickens and just made it on.

the first movie they showed on the bus was crash, and from there they made the smooth thematical transition into sleepless in seattle. the next movie was green mile, which was when i realized they´d put in a pirated dvd of FOUR tom hanks movies. probably if you´re bad in this life you get put on a non-air conditioned overnight bus, sweating your precious body fluids into a fake leather chair (that your guidebook (lonely planet´s guide to the afterlife) said would fold into a bed, but it won´t) that plays only tom hanks movies all the time on the way to hell, and if you were really bad, instead of letting you off at hell they just keep driving forever.

but i wasn´t that bad, or at any rate i´m not dead yet, so i just ended up in lima. as a further sign of God´s grace the dvd stopped working after green mile, so i was left to wade in my own sweat and hope that the sleepless night to guayaquil would make me so tired that i´d fall asleep some that night. it kind of did.

lima is, from what i have seen so far, an incredible city, and i have really really loved being here so far. highly recommended. i think i might take a shower today. or i might go for a record, too. my skin´s too white, but i SMELL like a local!

my home--on my back!

this is my last post from quito, so things are going to change around here. i'm heading off without my computer, so posts will be both not as common and probably not as picture-filled. i'll do my best to keep everyone updated on where i am and have been and am going and hopefully will occasionally find a way to put some pictures up along the way.

so in the spirit of making sure everyone knows where to look if i disappear (kidding, mom!), here's the plan for now. tonight i'm taking a night bus to guayaquil. i'll spend the day in guayaquil just looking around and then i'll take another bus that night to lima, which will probably be about a 24 hour ride. (hey, it's about $200 cheaper than flying!) that has me arriving in lima the night of the 21st or morning of the 22nd. the morning of the 25th janae flies through lima on her way to cuzco, so i'll jump on that plane with her. our machu picchu trek leaves cuzco the morning of the 27th, and we'll be back in cuzco from there on the 2nd. after a few days in cuzco, janae leaves (on the 5th of july) and i go to lake titicaca. that's as far into the future as my crystal ball can see. some sources indicate i'll go into bolivia first and then to chile, but i also get very strong sensations indicating that i won't bother with bolivia. so i guess i'll update this before then so everyone knows.

ok, wish me luck and send some prayers my way--the next adventure begins...now!

the last day of work

as expected, i was unable to make it through the last day of work without crying. toward the end of the day, everyone ran off and hid in the women's dressing room (where all such parties have always happened) in a really funny semi-attempt to be secretive about it, and then they brought me in there. the lights were off, and when i got there they turned on the lights and some 20 of my co-workers (everyone working that shift plus a few others) began singing auld lang syne--in spanish! it turns out the words aren't any better known in this country, because the song fell apart just like it does in english, and then came back together for "auld lang syne". next, dra. kon the anesthesiologist made a speech, and then dr. corral the anesthesiologist made a speech, and then karen the head of nurses at the hospital spoke, and then ximena the boss of the OR spoke. throughout all of this i was doing a pretty good job of biting my lip and screwing my face up, but then they asked me to talk, and i got about two words out before i got all choked up. i did the best i could to put into words what the people i've seen every day the last 4 months or so have come to mean to me, but i don't think i did a very good job. i'm much calmer now, but i still can't. i probably won't ever be able to, really. if you've done anything like this, you might know. but they all ended up as more than friends, and more than colleagues, and even more than people who shared and helped make an incredible learning and growing experience for me. i don't know. i'm already pretty sad about leaving, and i can tell i don't really get that i won't see these people again after the weekend.

anyway, i'm going to miss these people. this was one of those experiences you can tell you're not going to remember everything you want to as it's happening. here's some pictures.

here's dra. kon (under 4, 5, and 6) speechifying.








ximena applauds a speech, and i stand with my arms crossed. this is what i look like when i'm trying to will myself out of showing a room full of people what a crybaby i am.




in my defense, i wasn't the only one who cried. these people were really hoping mexico would do better than a tie against angola today.






there were also gifts (including this t-shirt, a wool south america-style poncho, and a wallet (now ecuador and i are even on wallets)) and cake and snacks and food. ecuadoreans like to throw parties, and they always do it up right, even if it's not for a particularly meaningful event.



so that was my last day of work. tomorrow we play the médicos again (this time in the final round--we're in first place with two games to go!), and then sunday i hang out with missionary dan (remember him from my first post when i got here? daughter likes shania twain. that's a reference for the loyal readers). on monday i take a night bus to guayaquil, and from there the second phase of this adventure begins!

la despedida

this sunday some of my friends at work threw me a going-away party at hilda's house, which is up in the mountains on a farm about an hour outside of quito. 10-15 of my coworkers were invited, and they brought their kids and stuff, too. it was fun--here's some pictures.

isn't this girl and her little chick just the cutest? this is marco's daughter, nicole.







the centerpiece of the party was the killing, preparing, and eating of a pig. this is a pretty rare and special thing here in ecuador, so i was very honored and pleased that they'd done it for me. here's a photo of the unhappy pig and some fun we had with it. (nicole kept trying to make maira touch the pig, which of course maira didn't want to do.) i think the pig would have minded the obvious slight, but, you know, it's a pig. and it was dead.
more evidence that i actually have done some work in ecuador. AND it's surgery! on a potato.







here are several of my friends crowded around the fritada (fried pork). they were pretty hungry. either that or they just like breathing smoke.





this is the finished product--here we have potatoes, fritada, tostada (roasted corn, and mote (sort of like...another kind of corn, steamed and stuff). it was very good. and there was a lot of it.




afterwards, they divided up the leftovers, which i'm guessing will last until next year or so. everyone's so happy. "yay! we will have food!"





the view was like this in pretty much all directions. just over my left shoulder is volcán pichincha, which unfortunately you can't really appreciate in this picture--it's really something and quite majestic. you should come sometime.

there was a lot more to the party, but i'm already sort of overstaying my welcome in pictures. there was also horse riding, cow-milking, corn picking, and several other activities. fun times were had by all. hurrah!

la mundial

in order to do surgery you have to have sterile equipment. my hospital does that with big autoclaves. but in order to run those you need steam. on friday our steam was turned off for maintenance purposes, which would mean we'd have a hard time keeping up with lots of surgeries. fortunately for us there were only three scheduled. if you've got your calendar out and you noticed that the world cup started on friday as well AND that ecuador played their first game that day, you might be wondering if that was a coincidence. well, it wasn't.

as if intentionally not scheduling surgeries on the day (and scheduling maintenance to make lots of surgeries an impossibility) doesn't fully capture the extent of world cup fever in the rest of the world, let's cut to the picture above, which is operating room D converted into one of the TWO rooms that were showing the game in the OR. or cut with me in your minds to the day before, when i watched the three afternoon anesthesiologists write "no" on two pieces of paper and "sí" on one and then draw them out of an intern's hand to see who would be stuck with the afternoon turn the day of the game (which started at 2pm).

and as if those preparatory measures didn't demonstrate the enthusiasm and passion for the game, let me tell you that every time anything happened or even ALMOST happened in the game, the noise and echoes of people screaming in that tile-covered room was easily as loud as most rock shows i've ever been to. but more to the point, you should have seen the faces of these people when ecuador scored their first goal. they were frozen in ecstasy, their hands unconsciously covering their slightly gaped mouths, their eyes on the verge of tears. they looked for all the world like it was their son that had just scored the goal, or even like their son had just been born.

i've drafted and then trashed several attempts to explain to my american (non-soccer loving) blog readers the significance of the world cup. i have several times attempted to describe by way of analogy to US sports the hugeness of the event, but have ultimately decided that anything that starts with "it's kind of like..." is already wrong because it truly is not like anything else, in american or world sport.

soccer is, more than any other sport, the world's game. no other sport is played as widely or followed as intensely as each nation's beloved fútbol. this is important for one thing because that means when you say "world championship" you're talking about a competition that truly every country plays and tries to excel at (unlike, say, basketball, which until recently the US dominated simply because nobody cared about it as much as we do, and now only a small percentage of the world plays seriously). but more than the scope of the competition, the international popularity of soccer makes it one of the world's most international languages--i would go so far as to say right up there with music and the visual arts. that everyone knows and understands soccer means that it's an avenue of cultural expression and identity--thus, brazilians play in a manner that is distinctly brazilian: care-free, vibrant, flashy, always high on style and entertainment. the germans are historically a team known for their strict discipline, tenacious defense, and ultra (über)-pragmatic approach to the game. similar statements can be made about the dutch, english, and italian teams, and so on.

so if you're someone who's heard some report of soccer fanaticism and thought "all that for a SPORT? i'm glad i don't care about it at all!", it's not just a sport. when ecuador played poland on friday as clear underdogs and managed an upset (2-0), it wasn't just the team that had earned international respect and left the pitch enraptured--it was an entire nation. it was the doctors, nurses, maintenance people, and patients in the hospital that day, and the people on the street as i walked home--they all walked with their chests and heads in the manner of someone who had accomplished something great that day. ecuadoreans who don't care much about football were on the edge of their seats for the game, screaming their hearts out at the TV because it was ECUADOR playing. it was their country--it was them.

the world cup only comes around every four years, so even if you don't care about soccer at all, i highly recommend watching a game or two, if nothing else to see the world convening to peacefully celebrate sport, competition, and each other. there really is nothing else like it on earth.

a good day in pictures.

i got the pictures of my greatest medical moment here in ecuador! they were taken on a cell phone (a razor!), so they quality's not all it could be. but you get the idea!

here's me and miguel (the intern who calls me jeremy spokin) closing the wound. we started on opposite ends and worked toward each other. isn't dr. ballesteros good at taking camera phone pictures?!?



here's another view of the action. look how happy i am! you can practically see my 200 watt smile from behind the mask!







here's me and several onlookers, who dr. ballesteros alternately referred to as my "barra" (cheering section) and "harem" (um...yeah). on the left is dra. kon, an anesthesiologist who i think is super top-notch. next to her is francisca espín, who is the anesthesiologist intern and is also a pretty cool person. next over is flor nuñez, a nurse. in the foreground is the scrub tech cecibel panchi.

i hope you all like the pictures--it was a great experience for me!

i love the smell of irony in the morning!

when i first got to the hospital, i wanted to spend more time in or near the surgeries rather than in sterilization or whatever else. so i found jobs that didn't require as much specialization to do. one such job was as the circulante, who helps prepare the surgery, fills out surgery papers, and is the non-sterilized person who can go get more sutures or gloves and open them in a sterile way so they won't be contaminated for gloved people to handle.

one of the easiest parts of that job (which i therefore have done a lot of) is placing stickers on a piece of paper as you see in the photo. what's going on here is, nearly everything the hospital uses that's not renewable (gloves, gauze, the little plastic cup in which the sample goes to the lab, etc etc etc.) comes with a little sticker which you remove from the packaging onto a sheet like this, which is then used to charge the patient--basically all costs are effeciently and accurately passed to the patient in this way.

one day as i was playing stickers in the OR much like i did when i was 5 i reflected on what exactly i was doing. i, the citizen of the wealthy nation had come to ecuador, a country with 70% of its population below the poverty line, to help the people. ...or to help take money from the people! haha. it's kind of funny. if you look at it right. or wrong.

notes for the road

lately i've been trying to prepare for my trip. it's had me thinking about it a lot, and honestly in some ways i'm not really looking forward to it. traveling is hard work, and sometimes sort of dangerous, and exhausting, and the solitude can be lonely, and to be honest it's been three months here and it'll be almost six by the time i get home, and i sometimes miss home and friends and family and food and, well, janae. so why, exactly, am i doing this in the first place?

i think the whole world is changing a lot, and a lot of things are being left behind to make room for internets and electricity and money. in that sense, this may be my last chance to see the world as it was, and definitely my only chance to see the world as it is. i want to see what it is and what it is not, by which i mean something other than running water, very clean and straight paved roads, good food or fast food or even just food, or money or enough money, or clocks and clothes and computers and cars. something other than my home, which in some way is who i am. it's not so much that i fear that i've grown to need these things to be happy or complete or even just a bit better. i worry that where home and humanity should be, these things are. or in other words that they're becoming me. by seeing what others do without here, i see what i could do without, too. these differences between ecuadoreans and chileans and peruvians and me are probably the only way for me, anyway, to see the similarities.

travel, then, is to do without, and in so doing to learn, to know, and to remember what it is to be human, to be part of the human race, to be one of them and one of us. so i'll hit the road alone (or mostly alone), and in being one i'll hopefully become one of the many. and in being so far away maybe i'll get closer. i'll get completely lost, and perhaps find something, too.

i'm not sure why i put all this here, but i think partly i feel so privileged to be here that my receiving and taking the blessing demands an explanation. and i think partly i want you all to understand what exactly you'll be asking when you see me later and say "how was your trip?" travel is just tourism like art is just entertainment.

t.g.i.f.

i was actually sort of kidding when i was talking about making a mix cd for the OR awhile back, but darn it all if those ecuadoreans don't really like 80's music. there's a group of trauma docs that i've become pretty good friends with who especially like it, and one guy in particular, dr. ballesteros, who knows more about american 80's pop than i do. "billy idol, no?" "thees ees the best song of cindy lauper" (he speaks a bit of english, too, no doubt from all the music and movies he's watched).

there are more surgeries in a day than they have 80's mixes to listen to, so i made my own contribution with songs they don't have that they tooootally need and brought it on friday. fortunately, there were several trauma surgeries that day, so we were all there: my favorite surgeries, my favorite doctors, and a whole cd of songs to listen to. dr. ballesteros joined the best doctors club by saying the magical "i won't need an assistant, jeremy can help" line, so i was pretty happy. things improved from there, though--as we washed up to enter, at the start of every song either he or this resident who calls me "jeremy spokin'" because of pearl jam would look at me and say "wake me up before you go, wham" or "modern english? no. modern english? i'll melt with you." or "devo!". it was great. we'd already started the surgery by the time we got to the clash's "should i stay or should i go now" (sorry chris, but it's EIGHTIES, and london calling doesn't make the cut), and they both stopped whatever part of the surgery they were doing to sing along to "esta indecisión me molesta" and all the other spanish echo parts. i've never really been especially fond of that song, but i'm pretty sure that memory will make me smile every time the clash sell another car on tv with that song.

what i'm trying to say is, it was pretty much a great day already when they handed me the tweezers and needle and let me do sutures, at which point it became a much better day. and so it was i made my first ever knots in somebody's skin to "hungry like the wolf".

(pictures to come when they get downloaded off the camera phone and sent to me. there will be no sparing anyone of blood and guts, though, so probably you should just never come back if you don't like that. you're warned!)