Czech Scavenger Hunt

So every year more or less I have to renew my visa.  I have named this process "Czech Scavenger Hunt" because in essence that is what it is.  You travel around Prague looking for government offices, collecting papers and stamps, and then you cash it in to find out if you've won a nice shiny new visa.  Well every year has been worse than the previous year.  I had always found out that I was missing certain things and in fact my first year I must have gone to the foreign police office seven times before I got the paperwork right.  I understand Czech well enough now to know where on the ministry of the interior website to look for all changes associated with visas and I've applied enough times to be able to do it.  Every year had been progressively worse because there has been a huge influx of visa applicants ever since the Czech Republic became part of the European Union.  With the CZ becoming part of Schengen I really thought it would be worse.  The last time I applied for my visa I tried to get into the office for three weeks but there were too many people waiting on line outside so that I finally had to camp outside the office from 2:30 a.m. on the last possible day that I could apply.  Anyway, to make a long story short this time I anticipated everything.  I gathered my paperwork months ahead of time and went to the foreign police yesterday a good three weeks before my deadline.  I waited from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m.  I had #131.  There was a computer crash and for three hours nothing happened.  At  6 p.m. #124 was called.  They told me I could come back tomorrow and not wait in line and I'd be taken care of right away.  So I wearily rode my bike home, had a class of whisky, and went to bed.  I woke up at 5:50 a.m. and was at the foreign police  at 7 a.m.  I was whisked to the front of the line and I was served by the first clerk.  Within 20 minutes a new visa was issued to me and it is valid until I graduate, so that is what is pictured above....some tangible proof that my time here is finite.  Anyway, waiting in the foreign police isn't all bad you can pass your time by looking at lots of natasha's and svetlanas.  The following music video by Sasha Dith sums it up quite well. 

Getting Better at this

Made some more falafel today.  I added some special spices and have really started to make Ainsley Harriet's recipe my own.  There is a great pizza place down the street from me run buy some guys who I think are Egyptian.  There's an Egyptian store next to it and the pizza place has some really good gyros.  Anyway, I went to said pizza place and bought a whole bread.  I think it's Turkish bread because it's definitely not Pita.  The whole bread cost me 32 crowns and I cut it into quarters, added left over veggies from yesterday, added some plain yogurt and voila...FALAFEL ala Dan.

Something Sweet to counteract all my bitterness.

So last week I went to cardiovascular surgery twice. I stopped off there about two weeks ago to make a semi formal internship for myself there over the next few months. For the past three years I have been going to work with the anesthesia services both in the normal O.R. and the Cardiovascular surgery O.R. as time permitted but I haven't really been able to do more than just intubate because I'm not around the same people all the time to get to the point where they know me well enough to do more stuff. Anyway, I spoke to the people in charge and told them I wanted to make a more concerted effort to gain experience in anesthesia and they were very receptive. I went there two days last week and in my two days there I did three central lines (Internal Jugular and Subclavian), an arterial cannulization (radial), and two intubations. It was very educational those two days. I spent about seven hours there the first day and time really felt like it flew by. There were a lot of interesting surgeries going on and I was nervous enough about doing all the procedures that when I wasn't doing them I was anxious about doing them a second time. It was a really great day and the people I worked with there who I hadn't worked with before were all really great, really friendly, really helpful. It was definitely my best time at this school yet and the only sad thing about it is that I realized how out of practice I was with doing actual skills. Too much time spent reading books paralyzes you when it comes to actually doing something with your hands.
Attached is a picture I took from the window of the cardio surgery. I find it kind of funny that across the street is a fried chicken kiosk which sells all sorts of artery clogging food. The other picture is of me standing in front of the bulletin board for english speaking students in cardiology.

What have we learned?

Well Friday ended the 3 week block of gastroenterology. I have to say that gastroenterology felt like a real block as a medical student. Every day we were on the wards for 2 hours and then we had a 2 hour lecture. Now the shocking thing was when we had our last day. I came in as usual early and changed into my labcoat in the locker room and instead of me being the only one in there as usual there were about 50 czech students. It was wall to wall Czech students. Apparently there was some sort of gastro block for the dentistry students. Anyway, that wasn't the alarming part the alarming part was that for the 50 some odd czech students every five minutes a doctor came down and rounded up about 5 of them for his group of instruction. So 50 czech students get broken into about 10 groups of five for instruction on the wards where as continuously our english speaking groups of 30-40 are broken into separate groups of 20 or 12 to a doctor. It only gets manageable when after the first few days of class the usual suspects decide to stop going to class and then our groups halve in size. It's all just another example in my mind of how the only function we serve at this school is to pay tuition. Every fall we are payed attention to for those first few weeks when our tuition hasn't been settled and then after that we are forgotten about and just told to go study. Unfortunately I forgot to take a picture of the mob of students.

I.P address tracing

Tracing the IP addresses of some previous comments gives me some clues as to the identitites of some of the commenters. The people who leave bitter, antagonistic remarks on my blog are welcome to but the fact that they are in a specific part of Virginia leads me to believe I know who it is and that person is far from being impartial towards Charles University. I also notice many supportive comments coming from the western Canada/ Ottawa area leading me to believe that Canada, our neighbor to the north, is more progressively minded and logical than most Americans will give them credit for. I like Canada. Not only have they given us Celine Dion and Tim Hortons, but I've met quite a few striking French Canadian girls who could give Prague's Slavic beauties a run for their money any day. If anyone from Mc Gill University reads my blog and can get me a residency there I'd like to take this opportunity to tell them I'd be more than happy to polish their maple leaf in return for a residency in anesthesia.

I'd like to once again reiterate that this blog serves as a catharsis of sorts. I am not trying to anti advertise my school or protest it. I have been here long enough to know that nothing here will change. I just write this blog to get my feelings out there and people who are interested in studying here might find my feelings to be of interest as they are not often publicized by others who have studied here or graduated from here. I have no desire to get into pissing contests with people on my blog via comments. You can leave what ever you want in terms of comments no matter how ludicrous or abusive, that's your right but if it was up to me I'd rather save my arguments for an in person situation, I'm no internet tough guy.