Now I know why people spend so much money on SD cards

I've had the camera phone a few days and I've been filling up the shitty little 64 MB SD card with video. I took some videos of me and the gang at the gymnastics club. I did some stuff today to see how crappy I've gotten and as some motivation to whip myself back into shape. Also, I went to the Gordon Ramsay school of coaching so send the kids out of the room for my language.P.S...the fourth video is funny...I land flat on my back at the end.

Cattle Cars and the Fucking Falling Dollar

So pictured here is the ridiculously falling exchange rate.  In fact if I had to make a disgusting analogy I would say that the dollar:crown exchange rate is falling faster than girls underpants at a frat party.  Refer to my post two days ago to see how in just two days we've gone down about a crown.  I think the war on terror is forcing the dollar to all time lows so that potential terrorists won't be able to afford quality bomb making ingredients.  Refer to Chris Rock's comedy routine to find out how to stop violence.  Chris rock says that they should make bullets the most expensive thing.  Guns should be cheap, bullets should be expensive.  $300 a bullet and you'll need to get a second job in order to kill someone.

I took some short videos of class to show how packed in we are.  It's like a cattle car, it even smells like one sometimes too.  Also pictured in front of the tuberculosis/pulmonary diseases clinic is one of our classmates from Ireland.  When I asked all the smokers to stand in front of the pulmonary diseases sign and smoke for a picture they all chickened out....

That's the idea

If you read the comment someone left from yesterday's post they sum up quite nicely what I've been saying for a long time and that is in circumstances such as ours when we have medical experience and unrelated university degrees it would probably be less of a pain in the ass to stay in america and retake classes and go to american med school than to come here and suffer.  I initially wanted to also come here to get the experience of living abroad for a few years and I'm glad I did that but in my time I have also realized I'm not a European in addition to not feeling a kindred with my fellow Americans so my best course of action would probably be to live abroad forever and rotate regions of the world as I get tired of them.  

Here's a clip of today's lecture in Pulmonary Diseases....way too many people in such a small space.  It was hot, uncomfortable, and smelly.

A Day in the Life

This is my attempt at showing a day in the life of a student at the oldest most prestigious medical faculty in central europe.  These posts will get better.  I'm so giddy that I finally have a camera phone...I'm approaching penulltimate europeanism.  The picture of the tower is the TV antenna that I live next to in Zizkov.  It's in the center of town and it's a great place to live, it's central to everything.  According to the greek/czech bellydance instructor who is in my gymnastics club it gives off bad energy and may be responsible for my energy imbalance and my less than chippy demeanor.  I snapped that picture when I went off to coach my gymnastics club.  I coach this club tuesdays and thursdays and every second tuesday some people from the company, DHL, come to learn tumbling in preparation for a cheerleading championship, those are the clips you see at the bottom.  When I get home at night after this club I'm hungry.  I want to thank Gordon Ramsay for teaching me how to make really delicious broccoli soup really cheap, that's the green stuff.  Cause I'm a really great guy who just really loves people and little kids I like to take that green shit up six flights of stairs to my friend and landlord at which time I eat the soup, play with his kid and drink wine, beer, and eat chocolate.  It's a tough job but someone's got to do it....are you tough enough to study at the first faculty of medicine?

Small Groups

So at school we are always tripling in number it seems.  After three years dwindling down from over 100 students to about 24 we are then doubled in size when all the exchange students want to study in prague in English.  The photos above are some photos of us being jammed into hallways and operating rooms like cattle.  I just got this new camera phone so I've been snapping away.  I couldn't help but snap away at the current exchange rate of the dollar which is half of what it was when I came here in '03.

Broccoli soup and infectious diseases

First of all let me start off by saying that Gordon Ramsay is a food genius.  With the writer's strike in America and the limited number of new episodes of House M.D. available for download I have become a disciple of Gordon Ramsay's kitchen nightmares.  I have watched almost all the episodes that were available to download and I feel like I can efficiently run a restaraunt if this medicine thing goes belly up.  I watch him cook and I can't help but think this man is a food genius.  His Broccoli soup  is so simple and so delicious.  I just made a batch and brought it up to my friend's wife and her mother who just drove in from Munich with some Bavarian food goodies.  The broccoli soup went great with the bavarian bread she brought.  I forgot to take a picture of how mine looked but trust me when I say it's a lot better than my bagels.

Infectious Diseases:

I took the exam in infectious diseases on wednesday and was really nervous.  There was so much material and I think infectious diseases will be paramount in terms of it's importance to doctors of all specialties.  I passed, I knew enough, but still I feel inept when it comes to medicine.  I have been studying for five years non stop and I don't seem to be able to pin down what's really important.  I read exhaustive reference books and get lost in the details losing the forest for the trees and then I read these brief overview books that don't give enough info by far and still it always seems as though no matter how much effort and pain I put into my studies I never seem to take away what my teachers think is the most important and there is always a moment where I look like an imbecile because my teachers ask me something I don't know the answer to but for some reason should....I need to get out of school already.  The years of reading and memorizing is taking its toll on me.  When people ask me a question no matter how easy and non medical it is all I can do is stop and scan my mind for some bit of memorized information that I can retort in a robotic fashion.  Ladies and Gentleman my brain has left the building.

Banana Bread

I figure if you are going to be a doctor and do things like cut people open and move around their innards or mix together all sorts of potentially toxic substances and inject them into someone then to do something as simple as baking should never be feared.  I am tired of the crappy baked goods in this town.  Bagels, banana bread, muffins, etc...they aren't very good or at least they aren't what I think of when I think of those things.  So I'm trying to become better at baking because I'm going to try and make all the things I like and freeze them so I don't have to buy these things in town and become disappointed.  Back in America coffee and muffins were a mainstay of my diet and for the time that I worked in the bagel place I developed a taste for good muffins like cranberry, blueberry, and REAL BRAN muffins with raisins.  Pictured here is my first attempt at making banana bread.  I didn't have the right pan for it and I eyeballed many of the ingredients and used a Nalgene bottle to measure the rest.  My banana bread came out looking more like blonde brownies..."blondies" you could call them.  Surprisingly these were pretty tasty and went quite well with my third pot of coffee.  I brought some upstairs to my friend and his wife the Bavarian Culinary genius and they both approved.....I'm excited and might go buy a muffin pan.

politics

I don't know why Britons seem more "keen" on American politics than myself.  I ran into a fellow student today, a Brit, and he asked me what I thought of the political situation.  Personally I don't care.  To be brutally honest I would be in favor of Al Qaeda and Rosie O Donnell taking over the American government if it would change the U.S. dollar: Czech Crown exchange rate in my favor.  I am fucking dying here.  Five years ago when I arrived on Czech soil I had saved up a lot of money and would look at my bank account balance daily for entertainment.  The dollar was equivalent to 33 CZK and the Czech Republic still wasn't part of the EU.  Now the dollar is something like 17 Kc and I don't even think you could get a beer much less a lapdance for that amount.  What is the world coming to?  So to sum up I don't care who becomes president but if nobody can get their ass in gear I might have to think about throwing my hat into the ring when I get stateside in four years cause I'll be old enough to run.  I honestly don't understand why the politicians with the best chances are the ones closest to death.  Just because a candidate is older doesn't mean they're more experienced and better.  I think if you did a risk analysis you would find a younger, more inexperienced candidate would be a better president than an old one who risks alzheimer's disease and senile demensia.  

Latest

So as I have said before I'm always amazed when I find out that people read my blog.  The last comment said that they wanted me to post more often it's just that I don't want to become one of those people who posts all the time but doesn't really post anything of worth.  Well I have some stuff to talk about:

So I just finished our infectious diseases block on friday.  It was a three week long block and it was pretty good.  I am interested in infectious diseases and I can definitely see how it would be very useful to my future occupation.  Almost everyone in an ICU develops an infection especially the ones who are ventilated.  Anyway, the block was pretty good.  The lectures weren't so bad and almost every day we did ward rounds for about two hours and I saw a variety of diseases that maybe I wouldn't have seen in America.  

In order for us to get our credit for the block and then take the oral exam we had to have near perfect attendance and we had to pass a written exam.  As always when I hear the words "written exam" here I cringe in fear because every really bad experience I have had here has been associated with a written exam.  I really don't think that they know how to write exams here.  Well there were a few copies of some previous written exams floating around and I got my hands on it about three days before the written.  I studied it as best as I could and took the exam on friday.  Out of 36 students I was one of two people who failed.  This doesn't really surprise me.  I seem to always be that guy who fails the written exams here.  I waited around till everyone was gone and I went over my exam with the teacher.  I was one question short of passing and many of the questions had questionable answers.  The teacher didn't even seem to know what the answers were he quite often said that he would have picked another answer or multiple answers.  The questions were very open to interpretation.  After we had been through the test there was in fact one question that we both felt I was right on and the teacher said that it was obvious I knew enough about infectious diseases to move forward and take the oral exam.  I do get mad with all of these stupid written exams at my school, but in this case I was glad that my teacher could see that the test was imperfect and he could evalutate me on a more individual level.  I thanked him for that.  He told me that the year before the foreign students had all gotten nearly perfect scores on the exam and for that reason they wrote a new exam for us this year.  He said that the exam that was written this year was done in haste and that it needed some revision.

So now I sit here at home with about eleven days to study for the oral exam in infectious diseases.  There is once again too much material and I have a faint idea of what is important.  I have seen a decent amount of the diseases we are responsible for in the clinics, but there are many things I didn't see in the clinic that I am responsible for knowing and reading Harrison's Internal Medicine although it is the bible of medicine seems a little bit too distracting.  I like having a definitive reference to study from but I am feeling like a dog chasing after my tail while studying.  I am inundated with facts and just not sure what is of the utmost importance.  As for right now I'm going to risk infection with Listeria and go downstairs to the store for some cream cheese.