china

  • No Reservations

    Okay now this is just getting ridiculous-I have sent in the majority of my applications, and a few of the optho programs want supplemental materials. For the most part this is easy, as they are merely requesting my CV and a photo, the photo presumably because nobody wants to be treated by an ugly doctor, and that will help me pass the first cut-off in interview selection.

    One school however, the university of Miami, an amazingly good optho program requires this:

    U miami Bascon Palmer: Additional
    materials required aside from CAS: a signed autobiographical sketch
    not to exceed 600 words

    Are you freaking kidding me? Could we make this any more vague? I mean, i already sent in my personal statement (thanks internet for proofing that which covers the whole why i want to be a doctor and now they are requesting ANOTHER personal statement and I honestly have no clue what they expect of me. Including my alternate statement for my backup specialty, this will make the third ps i have had to write in 2 months. I am just about drained of personality.

    In any event, like all my other statements, I am going to post it here on xanga. Not in the hopes that you, my ever so patient readership will assist in editing. No, I have asked that too much of you lately, and it is hard enough to get people to comment. I am posting it here because I have a functional writers block staring at a blank open office document, but I seem to be able to pound something out, no matter how inane or craptastic staring at this little text box here on xanga. So if you read this, thanks for your time, and if you dont…erm, thanks for nothing?

    ——————

    Umiami Autobiographical Sketch: No Reservations

    Scorpion doesnt sting quite as much as you would think-at least on the tongue. I discovered this at the Night Market in Beijing, China. I visited China for one month in the summer between my first and second year of medical school to study traditional chinese medicine such as acupuncture, moxibustion, and cupping. Learning about eastern medicine however, was only a part of the reason behind the trip, the remainder being to explore a new culture, country, and continent.

    I have always loved traveling, and China was only my latest stop in a series of jaunts around the world. In each locale I always tried to find not only some activity unique to the country, but also to learn at least a few words in the language, and immerse myself in the regional cuisine. Considering myself a bit of a “foodie”, I figure the best way to start learning about another culture is to eat it. Nothing starts a conversation like a shared meal.

    Which is how I found myself staring down the stinger of a deep fried scorpion. A group of us all in the acupuncture program has set out to complete an Iron Stomach Challenge, competing in a gustatory version of the game “chicken” to see who was most willing to fully embrace the full range of edible oddities available. We had already sampled the famous Peking duck complete with internal organs at a five star restaurant, rancid butter tea and yak genitals at a Tibetan restaurant, and “meat on stick” as the sign read at the stand adjoining our hotel. A travel guide listed Wangfujing street as the place to find exotic street food, so that was decided upon as our next stop.

    The stalls were lined with vendors selling cockroaches, starfish, crickets, snakes, everything I could imagine and a few things of which I had never thought. My digital camera at the ready as always, I snapped pictures of everything to ensure I wouldnt forget the experience; I needn’t have worried.

    The first bite was a cross between shrimp and french fries, crunchy on the outside with a chewy salty center that was actually rather pleasant on the tongue. The stinger while intimidating at first, was actually the easiest part and only pricked my tongue slightly while being consumed. Thankfully, no acupuncture was needed to heal me afterwards, though I am sure any of my fellow classmates would have been more than happy to put our newly accquired knowledge to good use should my qi have needed correction.

    On my return to the states, I posted all the albums and journal entries on my blog where the friends I made on my travels could see the adventures we had shared like bento boxes at the summit of Mount Fuji, fresh caught seafood on the banks of the mekong river in Thailand, paella and rioja at a tapas bar in Madrid and many others. (do i come off as too pushy here?-if so, nix this paragraph)

    I view life as an adventure, and among my goals is to visit every continent at least once and learn about its people, places and cultures while I am there. I hope to one day be able to combine my love of traveling with the career I have chosen for myself, and participate in medical missions which will allow me to interact with a place’s inhabitants as more than just a tourist, providing services in exchange for the opportunities I have been given to explore the world around me. At the very least, I can discover if everything really does taste like chicken.

  • Beihai day in the park

    More china photos. Yada Yada. Must finish before i go on thailand trip. Try to bear with me


    This is the majority of the china group, and where we had lectures when we were not in clinic or terrorizing the populace with our wacky american antics

    As I may or may not have mentioned before, while in china, I rented a bike to travel around beijing. While the first day definety felt like i was taking my life in my hands, since traffic laws in beijing are rather more like guidelines and suggestions. However, by the end of the trip, i was weaving in and out of cars and lanes, riding in the middle of the road, and slapping the hoods of cars that cut me off, just like a real chinese person. I also mastered the art of taking pics of myself one handed, and while steering a bike and not facing forward, hence the pictures of sandra, and then the one of me. Josh 3, Josh’s sense of self preservation 0

    Anyway, on this particular day, i returned to beihai park with sandra, alex, and soo to just hang out.
     
    Alex and Soo in traditional royal garb.

    Dont be fooled. This warning sign in beihai park is not telling you it is forbidden to erect chinese pagodas. It actually says you should not light firecrackers. It took 4 med students approximately 30 minutes to figure this out.

    Strikin a pose

    Alex and I will use this as the cover of our album if we ever make one


    So after climbing all the way up to the white dagoba, the wall of a thousand buddahs and the dagoba itself were under reconstruction and therefore we were not supposed to get any closer

    key word: supposed

    So naturally, after very minor pressure from me, the four of us waited til the security guard turned a corner, then we hopped over the gate, snuck around the construction, and climber up the stairs for a closer look. No attraction is closed when I am on vacation


    Pretty nice, eh?
    And from the top of the building, next to those buddhas and over 2 more security fences, was a great view of beijing. We could see all the way to the forbidden city!

    All the red buildings in case you had not figured that out.

    So, the last few major china posts i have to cover for you folks are the trip to xian, the trip to yellow mountain, and the night market wherein i consumed anything and everything the chinese were willing to sell me. Help keep me on target and make these posts before i leave for bangkok in february

  • Forbidden City

    Picking up from the last china post, after returning from the great wall, several of us went out for a night of heavy drinkering and, as such, i elected to sleep in the next morning and my mother, brother and myself went to the forbidden city to tour on our own when we finally got up.


    The south entrance to the forbidden city, perhaps best known for the portrait of Mao which hangs overhead

    and the backside of the entrance

    of course i had to be co-oprative before i entered the city.

    On an interestin side note, the reason the city is forbidden is because it is where all the emperor’s concubines lived and thus no men were allowed into the city. The few functionaries who had to enter were all castrated by the emperor (hows that for a job requirement??), and thus it became known as the forbidden city

    i’ll give the chinese this: they sure can make the most ordinary things sound poetic…give a hoot, dont pollute

    Me and my shaw
     
    and because the forbidden city was full of huge pots, and because i am immature…

  • Sacred Road

    Near the section of the great wall we visited there lay the ming tombs. However, those were deemed too far away for our bus driver to go to, so we opted instead to visit the sacred road, the path along which dead emperors would travel before being taken to their feng shui-ed buria place.


    Inside this entrance to the sacred road was a giant turtle stele

    If you rubbed his head, you get good luck, or curing of your ailments, or something, i am a little hazy on the details by this point


    the sacred road itself, lined by sacred animals, which we almost certainly are not supposed to do anything to


    good thing all the do not climb or touch signs were in chinese so we couldnt understand them. Except for one, which i took a picture of and then lost when my computer crashed


    our gang in the far off distance, and a handy guide to the sacred road. those big white circles mark where important chinese people are buried


    I just liked this guy

    Sadly, no more stuff on sacred road due to the aforementioned crash of the computer. thank goodness i managed to load most of my pics online. Oh well, til next time

    -J

  • What you’ve been waiting for…i think

    All right, finally managed to upload some pics from one of my trips out to the Great Wall of China! I actually went to a couple locations for the great wall, but more on that later.
    This is not the great wall, just some random neon castle on the way there…why? who knows?


    More photos from the drive there


    At last, the entrance to a super touristy section of the wall! Although we got there pretty early in the morning, so on the whole we were able to beat the crowds. Before we began the climb up though, we figured we should pick a place and a time to meet back in case our multitudinous group should become separated during their explorations. Luckily, near the entrance we spotted


    That’s right.because nothing says ancient endless empire like the great wall starbucks


    Now some of you may have conceived of the great wall as rather, well flat. This is very not true. It is in fact a fairly steep and ongoing trek.

    The handrails were added later, but another word of warning about chinese architects…they have no concept of consistent measurement. Steps would arbitrarily be very narrow or wide so you could not know from one moment to the next if the step would be wide enough for your foot to fit on. As an added bonus, the height changed with each step as well. I dont know, maybe in ancient china they had one yao ming and one midget sized chinese soldier patrol together and didnt want to show favoritism to either one, so they just randomly changed step height and width.


    Ted and I don’t see any mongols, but rainclouds are a-coming


    luckily, Jon was prepared for just such an eventuality


    And here is michelle in an artistic pose in one of the guardhouse windows. *sigh* guarding is SUCH hard work.


    Jon, Kai, Me, and my mom, once again joining us for the days adventures
    This section of the wall brought to you by…the 2008 olympics!
    didn’t believe me about the crowds? here are some vendors who set up shop on the wall.


    didn’t believe me about the steepess either, eh?
    After a moderately arduous climb, we finally reached the top, and early enough that not many crowds were at the north end of this section of wall. Several of our group members opted to try and make the peak at the other end and set off on a brisk hike. The rest of us decided it was late enough in the morning that we could be immature again. 


    From where we were standing at the north end of the restored section of the wall, we could see the unrestored part where we clearly were not supposed to go.
    So OF COURSE we decided to hop over the wall and go explore the area. If you didn’t see this one coming, you clearly do not know me at all

    Here is a pic someone took of ted, james and I from on high

    The best photos are always when you are breaking the law…also, i have a piece of the great wall now. Then it was time for us to climb back up before any guards got there to take us away to commie prison

    Since there were no guards to be seen, we opted to continue our fun and take a few pics hanging off the wall, to get a perspective for what the chinese soldiers AND the mongols felt like

    One of the net things i noticed was the abundance of graffiti on the wall
    and i figured as long as everyone else was leaving their immortal mark, oh what the hell, i would too.


    Well, my name can’t be written in kanji. what do you want from me? 

    Finally, we met back and did some shopping at the bottom of the wall before we left on the buses to go to the next destination

    -J

  • Divine Music Administration

    Now that i am back from break…well, figuratively speaking, as i did not actually go anywhere, i will try and get my posting back on track and try and finish up these china posts. However in the event you get sick of my excuses and jumping around, i am tagging all the china posts as “china” so you can read them from beginning to end by simply clicking on the appropriate tag in the labeled box to your left

    thanks, now back to your regularly scheduled posting

    When last we left our hero, he was touring the grounds of the temple of heaven complex and on his way to the divine music administration


    Now should you ever get the opportunity to visit beijing and the temple of heaven, this place is in the southeast corner of the grounds and definetly worth checking out. Not only do the chinese have one of the first recorded scales of music and early versions of the instruments we know and love, but they let you PLAY with them! yay!


    You can ring my belll-ell ell…ring my bell!


    marching to the beat of your own drum


    The hall of famous chinese musicians…i think, my ability to read chinese is how do you say, not so good.


    Heavenly conductor, or chinese jesus?

    Chinese Jesus for sure!


    They even had chinese gangsta rap!


    They also have performances of what an ancient chinese orchestra sounded like every hour for free!, well free with admission anyway


    Til next post, peace out y’all….far east, west side!

    -J

  • Temple of Heaven

    picking up right where we left off, i swear, the next stop on the china trip was a foray to the temple of heavenly harvest, aka Temple of Heaven. You gotta hand it to the chinese, they know how to name their monuments

    The Temple of Heaven, literally the Altar of Heaven (天坛), is a complex of Taoist buildings situated in southeastern urban Beijing, in Xuanwu District. Construction of the complex began in 1420, and was thereafter visited by all subsequent Emperors of the Ming and Qing dynasties. It is regarded as a Taoist temple


    as seen from far away. En route to the temple of heaven, we stopped to see the long corridor


    yep. pretty darn long

    All along the corridor leading to the temple were people playing mah jong and this weird paddle game where you had to catch a birdie and then toss it back in fancy ways. Here is a pic of me totally showing off with a behind the back catch and toss. remember kids, you cant spell awesome without ME


    Here is the group that went to the temple… from the bottom right: laura, me, brian, my mom, alex, soo, james, vince, jon, and leslie.

    The Hall of Annual Prayer (祈年殿), a magnificent triple-gabled
    circular building, built on three levels of marble stone base, where
    the Emperor prayed for good harvests.The Hall of Prayer was built without a single nail. All the buildings within the Temple have special dark blue roof tiles, again representing the Heaven. (this fascinating tidbit has been brought to you by wikipedia-stay in school kids!)


    vicious guardians, that temple has


    Alex and I in one of the other buildings in the temple of heaven complex

     
    Given that most of the complex looked like this


    I immediately thought of video games:


    MORTAL KOMBAT!


    The altars for the hall of prayer, stored in a completely different building when they are not in use

    Couldn’t quite make the age cutoff to get into this club

    later today (so as not to overclog your bandwith), the completion of the visit to the temple of heaven and the divine music administration!

    -J

  • Til the fat lady sings

    As I have mentioned before, the program was not just about learning chinese medicine, but also to be exposed to chinese culture- and as everyone knows, when you hear culture, you think bacteria opera. So we were taken courtesy of the program to see traditional beijing/peking opera



    Flashy opera house, yesno?

    Once again, here is almost our whole group-never did manage to get everyone in one pic, but oh how i kept trying.

    The inside of the theater is nto quite what we expected based on the outside

    So what is peking opera like? well it’s hard to describe
    .

     jackie chan and sammo hung both acquired their martial arts skills here, as the opera trains its actors in acrobatics. The story being shown above is about the battle of monkey king


    And this one is about someone bringing the rains down to africa china.
    thinking the costumed beauty above is pretty talented?…well, IT’S A MAN, BABY

    For the next couple weeks we amused ourselves by trying to duplicate those sounds…ee sa! I know, i am terribly culturally insensitive, but thankfully i have learned to live with it


    here is me with monkey king himself-and no, i did not prompt him to make the internationa symbol for asian in a photo-it is just instinct

    Well after so much fun, several of us were not ready for the night to end. So when the bus taking us back to the hotel stopped at a red light near San Li Tun Bar Street, we told the driver to stop so we could get off. While a bit nonplussed that several passengers had decided to get off for no apparent reason, the driver complied.

    San Li Tun is the expatriate bar street, and as such, the prices are way more expensive than elsewhere in china for alcohol-we had to pay almost 30-40 yuan per drink ($4-5) compared to our normal 8-16 ($1-2)…I know! tai gue le (translation-too expensive)


    you know i cant resist corny pics like this-and if you didn’t, welcome to my site for the first time ever

    if the pics are a little out of focus, well that is because we were all a bit tipsy. Not pictured are my mom and brother who also came along for the drinkering. Yes, once again i went drinking with my mom-i am such a bad influence, but what the hell is still always the right decision.

    In Several of the bars, live bands were performing and the majority of the bar patrons were just sitting there passively listening to the music….not us Americans! We got up on stage with the singers and joined them…

    Here is phil, busting a move…later I took over the mic and regaled the br with my rendition of sweet child of mine-i’m a sucker for guns and roses

    So ended our night…laughing, singing, drinking, and good times were had by all

    -J

  • Hungry? Duck!

    Toward the end of my first week in china, Everyone in the program had finally arrived and we were all ready to get our acupuncture on…but what better way to celebrate all these newfound friends than by heading out to a quality meal. And given that we were residing in Bejing, what better meal than peking duck?


    This is the majority of the acupuncture group, sans a few classmates from CMS (those CMS people, always late… )


    Just to prove that athough we may be growing older, we will never grow up

    And now to introduce the cast of characters:


    From left: vince, leslie, and phil


    Sandra, Harry, and me


    Jenny, Ted, and Jen


    Michelle, Lara, James, and with his back to you, Jon


    And of course, the fam

    Now lets eat!


    Every part of the duck was consumed by yours truly- white meat, dark meat, lungs, liver, intestine, kidneys, heart and whatever else they slapped down on a plate in front of me…when in rome, right?

    And I was not the only one…brian opted to gain his enemy’s knowledge by consuming his brain!


    Here is a pic of all the duck parts I ate! mmm mmm good!


    Afflack!

    The next night, the program director had arranged for us to go and see a performance of peking opera! So join us next time, same bat time, same bat url for the exciting continuation of our story!

    -J

  • Family Fun Time in the Park

    Two china posts in two days? YES, i hear you cry out in internet land. Why am i being so generous…mostly because i cannot make myself study 24-7 when exams are not forthcoming. SO in the meantime, off we go

    If you recall a few episodes back we journeyed via rickshaw to a number of locations, one of which was prince gong’s garden where we took part in a chinese tea ceremony. Well we enjoyed ourselves so much, we decided to go back and spend some more time exploring the rest of the grounds, which we could not before since it was raining the first time around


    I think i finally understand why all chinese people know kung fu-because the scenery of ancient china just makes you want to start kung fu fighting


    As mentioned earlier, bats where apparently a symbol for good luck, and as such, the lake above was shaped like a bat to bring good fotune to the inhabitants of the palace. Sadly, despite searching high and low, i was unable to find a batcave-so i guess i will not be carrying out my own unique brand of vigilante justice in beijing

    Next stop was beihai park, one of the largest parks in beijing…so much so that you will not see it all in this post (like how i keep teasing you? it is a literary technique know in some circles as “foreshadowing” and in others as “being a jerk”)


    Seen from far off, the white dagoba in the center of beihai park

    We came across this impromptu concert while walking in the park. It was nice. It held our attention for all of 5 minutes until i noticed a bunch of middle aged chinese women line dancing in another corner of the park, and off we went to join in and learn several chinese line dances. Then in exchange for their gracious allowing of me and my mom to join (brian did not want to partake in the dancering) we taught the people the electric slide. Thank you years of bar mitzvahs. Sadly no pictures or video of this, as i was busy dancing, but take my word for it, good times were had by all


    One of the attractions in the park was the 9 dragon wall

    We also saw a bunch of people doing tai chi, followed by several pictures with no explanation

    Hmmm…who to oppress today? I know! EVERYBODY!


    Even the emperor fears empress mom

    Yes i went to another country to play dress up-surprised? i thought not

    -J