...So intern year has started, and 'the blog' has fallen by the wayside. I'll try to be better at putting in entries - if not for anyone else, then for myself, to keep a record of this um, memorable experience...
I wrote this in an email to a friend, and realized that I was actually "blogging" at him, as I had stopped having some outlet for my self-absorbed thoughts. So this is more of an appropriate place for what I wrote than my original email.
****
Things are going pretty well. am now on the outpatient block (just ending - sadly), and it's been quite restful. I walk to work at 8 every day and get home by 5 or 6. My walk is ~20 minutes each way and i spend it staring into people's homes and gardens, and taking a lot of deep breaths. I get home in the evening, spend an hour rocking on my hammock with a glass of wine (and my laptop -eek- it's an addiction!), and then maybe catch up on notes or do some reading (not really), or go join one group or another of interns who are out drinking away their stress.
It's amazing how everything is relative in life. My 8-5, M-F schedule still feels a bit like vacation -- like I'm cheating on my residency or something - when for most people it is a normal day to day job. I guess if I was confronted with a lifetime of this schedule, it would wear on me, as well. But no worries, I start on wards on Monday, and that pleasure will last me three months. .
..and at moments like this, I take a huge sigh of relief for choosing my program, where the wards schedule is sane, where the environment is supportive, and where three months of wards do not feel threatening to anything but my vitamin D levels. I have friends who are suffering at other programs (and others who are thriving despite a much more rigorous schedule), but I really feel like I made a great decision.
Intern year is kind of like third year of medical school again - where you get thrown into a completely new role, and continuously get reminded of how little you know. I've had multiple days this week, where I've seen a patient, presented their case in an overwhelmed and disorganized fashion to the attending, and then literally ended by saying, "Frankly, I suck at ortho/derm/rheum/post-hospital care/cancer/(insert-everything-but-DM/CAD/CHF) and I have no idea where to go from here". And pretty much always, the patient, jolly, unassuming attending will respond, without blinking an eye, 'well then, lets go figure it out!' .....and we go, and we do, and I learn something new.
I have quite a few friends applying to residency programs right now, and they ask me how I chose the ones I did. Last year, I knew this was an important question, but I guess I didn't actually understand just how important it was to me. When choosing the place where you will, ultimately, be shaped into the doctor you want to be, It is important to know what you need the most: is it an intense, sometimes malignant, environment that will pressure you to do your best, or is it a supportive atmosphere that will attempt to keep you sane (while you continue put pressure on yourself to do better -- not just for your patients and yourself -- but also for all these nice people that seem to be putting a whole lot of faith and trust in you.)
I guess we end up where we want to be. My life is far from where I had hoped it would be right now, but it's going OK. The carrots and zucchini have peaked their heads out in the garden, Spike the Pond Fish has not died despite the aphid infestation, and as I prepare to enter to bowels of the hospital for another three months, I'm actually -gasp- possibly -gasp- looking forward to it.
Thursday, September 11, 2008
Thursday, June 26, 2008
My first night on call in the cardiac intensive care unit
So this morning, after surviving my first call night in the CCU, I was beginning to get giddy. I started to think about the relieved, victorious?, humor-packed entry I was going to write as soon as I got home. But then, as I was about to leave the hospital, I realized that the handbag that I had brought with me to the hospital to help me carry all my stuff was missing. I walked the halls for about hall an hour, a bit resigned to having misplaced it, but sure that I would find it eventually. After not finding it on any of the hospital floors I had visited, and almost ready to go home to deal with it later, I realized that not only did I have my wallet in that bag, but also my house and car keys. At this point, nearly 32 hours had rolled by since I had last slept (and only 4 hours that night because of the anxiety of starting call!), and the adrenaline rush that had kept me going through my call night had warn off. I crossed the halls frantically looking for my bag again - with the amazing ER nurses springing into action to look into every nook and cranny of the place - but finally had to admit to it being gone. Exhausted now, with all the emotions/stresses of the night catching up with me, I walked the two blocks to my friend's house and broke down the minute she opened the door. Half an hour later, I had a warm breakfast in my belly (the first food in nearly 20 hours), and - with the $100 my friend lent me - was meeting a locksmith in front of my house. I collapsed in bed 34 hours after pulling myself out of it the day before.
Now, after a 5 hour nap, I'm a bit more calm and rested, and can actually write a bit about my first call night in the CCU.
It had been an intense night. There were probably several moments throughout the night when intense doubt about my own capabilities and motivation overwhelmed me in a way I've never experienced since starting medical school. Probably the one thing that best sums up my experience is the moment this morning when -after being at the hospital for more than 27 hours- I realized I hadn't peed since I had left my house!
CCU is probably our busiest rotation, with many critically ill patients, and multiple new admissions and discharges every day. Despite trying my best to prepare myself the day before, I started the day off completely overwhelmed. I had 6 patients to pre-round on in the morning, and because I received them only the night before, I had not had a chance to catch up on their complicated histories. Furthermore, due to the new resident work hour restrictions (laws that prevent residents from working more than 80 hours a week), I was not allowed to enter the hospital until 6am. That meant that I had 90 minutes to gather relevant information about my patients, meet and examine them, understand their medical care and management, and write my notes before rounds. And I knew that I had to try to do that, because as soon as rounds ended, I would be admitting new patients and eventually cross-covering for the entire ICU list of 28.
So for morning pre-rounds, I did exactly what we had been taught not to do and what patients absolutely hate about staying in the hospital: I ran into their rooms, asked them a few quick questions, tried to cut them off as soon as they tried to make any conversation, and ran out about 2-3 minutes later, promising to come back and finish our discussion later (which, I never had a chance to do).
Rounds were embarrassing. All of our patients are, by default, cardiac patients, so at first glance, they all seem the same. I had just skimmed over the files of 6 of them and tried to catch up on their individual hospital courses, and within 10 minutes it was all a blur. Which one Ideally, I would have taken a deep breath and focused my mind before each presentation, but whenever I tried to, my mind would just go into a panicked blank. I was doing such an incredibly terrible job, that my stomach was cramping up.
The rest of the day and night, I was playing constant catch-up, constantly feeling as if I just needed that "one more thing" to completely overwhelm. My residents were great. I was covering 8 patients during the day, while he was covering me and 3 other interns and a total of 28 patients. For the night and evening, it was just me and a new resident, admitting patients, and covering for all 28 patients. Every time I stopped to write something or catch up on a bit of work, my pager would go off. Often, the questions/requests the nurses called me about were not simple things I could just answer, and I would watch my night slip by out of my grip with every new page.
I started to subconsciously label every encounter with a time value: if something was going to take less than two minute of my time, it was as if I had won the lottery. There was the patient I admitted who was transferred from an outside hospital at 9pm. He was brought with a paper chart of nearly 200 pages, which appeared to have been freshly printed and then dropped on the floor and restacked in completely random order. It took me nearly an hour just to go through his chart, and another hour to gather a history from his anxious family. During the night, while my resident was busy covering half of the patients I should have been able to cover, I was kept busy finishing my admissions, answering random pages, and responding to urgent calls about new onset delirium, chest pain (not a light matter in the cardiac intensive care unit), sudden onset of severe pain with abdominal distention, and an acute drug rash that burned, itched and covered my 91 year old patient's entire body. Between there were the calls for the agitated patients, the need for clarification of orders I had not written, etc. I had to control my impulse to complete a task or thought instead of jumping up to immediately return every page, or I would not get anything done.
...And then there was dictation. I have never before dictated in my life and the experience has always paralyzed me in fear. In our orientation, they had told us that we needed to dictate the admission note for each new patients, and also write one in the chart. They suggested that we put a skeleton note in the chart and add more details to the dictated note. Unfortunately, as became clear during my first attempt at dictating, the part of my brain that regurgitates information is quite separate from the part that actually thinks. And when I am tired and stressed, the part of my brain that thinks does not seem to connect well with the part that speaks. I stumbled, swore, and um'ed my way through the first dictation, forever thankful for the rewind button, trying desperately to calm down and think clearly. For my next notes, I wrote all the information in detail and mindlessly read off my notes as fast as I could.
There were a few really good things that happened as well. I never yelled at (or got yelled by) a nurse. I seemed to be able to hide my stress well from everyone but the residents. I was able to answer a page calmly, walk in to a sick patient's room and logically think through whatever crisis was going. I didn't hurt or kill anyone, and I even had a patient's family come up to me in the morning and thank me for spending the night taking care of their brother. Small things, I know, but after a night like that, one has to hold on to every silver lining.
Now, after a 5 hour nap, I'm a bit more calm and rested, and can actually write a bit about my first call night in the CCU.
It had been an intense night. There were probably several moments throughout the night when intense doubt about my own capabilities and motivation overwhelmed me in a way I've never experienced since starting medical school. Probably the one thing that best sums up my experience is the moment this morning when -after being at the hospital for more than 27 hours- I realized I hadn't peed since I had left my house!
CCU is probably our busiest rotation, with many critically ill patients, and multiple new admissions and discharges every day. Despite trying my best to prepare myself the day before, I started the day off completely overwhelmed. I had 6 patients to pre-round on in the morning, and because I received them only the night before, I had not had a chance to catch up on their complicated histories. Furthermore, due to the new resident work hour restrictions (laws that prevent residents from working more than 80 hours a week), I was not allowed to enter the hospital until 6am. That meant that I had 90 minutes to gather relevant information about my patients, meet and examine them, understand their medical care and management, and write my notes before rounds. And I knew that I had to try to do that, because as soon as rounds ended, I would be admitting new patients and eventually cross-covering for the entire ICU list of 28.
So for morning pre-rounds, I did exactly what we had been taught not to do and what patients absolutely hate about staying in the hospital: I ran into their rooms, asked them a few quick questions, tried to cut them off as soon as they tried to make any conversation, and ran out about 2-3 minutes later, promising to come back and finish our discussion later (which, I never had a chance to do).
Rounds were embarrassing. All of our patients are, by default, cardiac patients, so at first glance, they all seem the same. I had just skimmed over the files of 6 of them and tried to catch up on their individual hospital courses, and within 10 minutes it was all a blur. Which one Ideally, I would have taken a deep breath and focused my mind before each presentation, but whenever I tried to, my mind would just go into a panicked blank. I was doing such an incredibly terrible job, that my stomach was cramping up.
The rest of the day and night, I was playing constant catch-up, constantly feeling as if I just needed that "one more thing" to completely overwhelm. My residents were great. I was covering 8 patients during the day, while he was covering me and 3 other interns and a total of 28 patients. For the night and evening, it was just me and a new resident, admitting patients, and covering for all 28 patients. Every time I stopped to write something or catch up on a bit of work, my pager would go off. Often, the questions/requests the nurses called me about were not simple things I could just answer, and I would watch my night slip by out of my grip with every new page.
I started to subconsciously label every encounter with a time value: if something was going to take less than two minute of my time, it was as if I had won the lottery. There was the patient I admitted who was transferred from an outside hospital at 9pm. He was brought with a paper chart of nearly 200 pages, which appeared to have been freshly printed and then dropped on the floor and restacked in completely random order. It took me nearly an hour just to go through his chart, and another hour to gather a history from his anxious family. During the night, while my resident was busy covering half of the patients I should have been able to cover, I was kept busy finishing my admissions, answering random pages, and responding to urgent calls about new onset delirium, chest pain (not a light matter in the cardiac intensive care unit), sudden onset of severe pain with abdominal distention, and an acute drug rash that burned, itched and covered my 91 year old patient's entire body. Between there were the calls for the agitated patients, the need for clarification of orders I had not written, etc. I had to control my impulse to complete a task or thought instead of jumping up to immediately return every page, or I would not get anything done.
...And then there was dictation. I have never before dictated in my life and the experience has always paralyzed me in fear. In our orientation, they had told us that we needed to dictate the admission note for each new patients, and also write one in the chart. They suggested that we put a skeleton note in the chart and add more details to the dictated note. Unfortunately, as became clear during my first attempt at dictating, the part of my brain that regurgitates information is quite separate from the part that actually thinks. And when I am tired and stressed, the part of my brain that thinks does not seem to connect well with the part that speaks. I stumbled, swore, and um'ed my way through the first dictation, forever thankful for the rewind button, trying desperately to calm down and think clearly. For my next notes, I wrote all the information in detail and mindlessly read off my notes as fast as I could.
There were a few really good things that happened as well. I never yelled at (or got yelled by) a nurse. I seemed to be able to hide my stress well from everyone but the residents. I was able to answer a page calmly, walk in to a sick patient's room and logically think through whatever crisis was going. I didn't hurt or kill anyone, and I even had a patient's family come up to me in the morning and thank me for spending the night taking care of their brother. Small things, I know, but after a night like that, one has to hold on to every silver lining.
Sunday, June 22, 2008
whirlwind
My life is a whirlwind. I'm in the process of moving into my new house, doing intern orientation, and trying not to panic about my upcoming First Day of Being Someone's Doctor.
I start on Wednesday. On 30 hour call. In the Critical Care Unit.
Between now and then, I have a few more curtains to install, bookcases to set up and boxes to unpack. I would also like to maybe, possibly, spend all of Tuesday getting ready for my upcoming day. I will spend Wed 6am-Thursday 10am admitting new patients, writing (and dictating!) H&Ps, and cross-covering for the 28 patients who will be under my care overnight. Fortunately, there will be a second year resident there with me (or I'm pretty sure someone might die, and not just me.)
This Saturday, I spent the entire day with my fellow IM interns learning Advanced Cardiac Life Support. Despite it seeming rather overwhelming at first, I was surprised how much I learned throughout the day. Though I doubt I'll have to run a code on my own anytime soon -though you never know- I'm pretty surprised by the fact that I can remember most of the algorithms...even an entire day later.
Today, about 16 of us from my intern class got together, bought cold beer and snacks, rented some rafts, and floated down the Sacramento river for a few hours. It was a great day. Starting Wed, none of us will have the same day off together again for an entire year, but we will definitely need to get along, and take care of each other in these difficult few months. A bit of bonding in the sun may just have guaranteed that even in our most exhaustive, darkest hours, we will not feel alone.
I start on Wednesday. On 30 hour call. In the Critical Care Unit.
Between now and then, I have a few more curtains to install, bookcases to set up and boxes to unpack. I would also like to maybe, possibly, spend all of Tuesday getting ready for my upcoming day. I will spend Wed 6am-Thursday 10am admitting new patients, writing (and dictating!) H&Ps, and cross-covering for the 28 patients who will be under my care overnight. Fortunately, there will be a second year resident there with me (or I'm pretty sure someone might die, and not just me.)
This Saturday, I spent the entire day with my fellow IM interns learning Advanced Cardiac Life Support. Despite it seeming rather overwhelming at first, I was surprised how much I learned throughout the day. Though I doubt I'll have to run a code on my own anytime soon -though you never know- I'm pretty surprised by the fact that I can remember most of the algorithms...even an entire day later.
Today, about 16 of us from my intern class got together, bought cold beer and snacks, rented some rafts, and floated down the Sacramento river for a few hours. It was a great day. Starting Wed, none of us will have the same day off together again for an entire year, but we will definitely need to get along, and take care of each other in these difficult few months. A bit of bonding in the sun may just have guaranteed that even in our most exhaustive, darkest hours, we will not feel alone.
Monday, June 09, 2008
it's been a blur
Hera I am, hoping to start writing again, after a bit of break. I still haven't written about Nuzvid...but maybe there is still time before internship starts.
Yesterday, I graduated from medical school with my classmates. It had been a whirlwind last few weeks and an extraordinary last four years. They went by very quickly, yet were probably some of the most remarkable years of my life. I've gained wonderful friends that I hope never to lose touch with and I have chipped away a bit further at defining that thing that is my identity.
I don't know really how I feel right now. Not really relieved, as the hardest part of med school ended quite a few months (almost a year!) ago. Maybe a bit incredulous...no, that's not the right word...suspicious...about this whole MD degree thing. My stomach ties up in a knot everytime I think that someone would actually call me a doctor. I mean, technically, I'm a doctor, but not actually, right?
Then there's the bittersweet part of all of this, something that I am getting more and more used to as each new phase of my life ends and begins. The shelving of a lifestyle, of a group of friends, of weekly bar nights and pool games, of ridiculous parties with people I've come to be very close to, as we -nearly- all part and head off our separate ways. This happened after high school and college, then when I left my life in the Bay Area for medical school, and now, once more. (It happened -probably most traumatically- when I left family and friends in Poland as an 8 year old.) And I have no doubt that it will happen again.
It leaves a cramping emptiness in me; a yearning to settle down, once and for all. It numbs any aspirations I may have to pursue job/career/identity at all cost. I realize that that is probably why I wanted to buy a house these past few months, despite it being in the wrong city (and for me, at least, at the wrong time) and it definitely explains why I cannot see myself living further from my family than I am now.
Ahh...but these are not thoughts for blogs...
This past few week has been a blur. Nightly events/dinners/parties with classmates. Over this past year, my class has come together closer and closer. We are so different and yet held together by this remarkable shared experience. I hope to see all of them again in my life.
On Saturday, we all donned black velvet robes and black caps with green tassels, and walked across the stage to get our green hoods and medical degrees. The Mondavi Center was filled with cheering family and friends, and each one of us was allowed to have two people join us on the stage when we received our diploma. We entered and left the ceremony in a procession led by bagpipes. Everyone was nervously ecstatic pretty much all the way through the day, and even when everything ended, there was still a sense of unfinished energy in the air.
I came home too exhausted to sleep that night, and now a strange few weeks have begun. I've rented a house to live in for the next year, but will go and travel a bit more before moving in next week. Meantime, many of my friends are leaving, and though most are staying relatively near, all of us know that the residency years to come will magnify any distance there is. I start my internship in the cardiac intensive care unit in a little over two weeks, and the gravity of that thought is nearly suffocating.
For now though, I'm taking everything a day at a time. Sleeping, spending time with family, letting a bit of the early summer sun warm my skin, and trying to remember to breathe...
Here are a few photos from graduation day:
Yesterday, I graduated from medical school with my classmates. It had been a whirlwind last few weeks and an extraordinary last four years. They went by very quickly, yet were probably some of the most remarkable years of my life. I've gained wonderful friends that I hope never to lose touch with and I have chipped away a bit further at defining that thing that is my identity.
I don't know really how I feel right now. Not really relieved, as the hardest part of med school ended quite a few months (almost a year!) ago. Maybe a bit incredulous...no, that's not the right word...suspicious...about this whole MD degree thing. My stomach ties up in a knot everytime I think that someone would actually call me a doctor. I mean, technically, I'm a doctor, but not actually, right?
Then there's the bittersweet part of all of this, something that I am getting more and more used to as each new phase of my life ends and begins. The shelving of a lifestyle, of a group of friends, of weekly bar nights and pool games, of ridiculous parties with people I've come to be very close to, as we -nearly- all part and head off our separate ways. This happened after high school and college, then when I left my life in the Bay Area for medical school, and now, once more. (It happened -probably most traumatically- when I left family and friends in Poland as an 8 year old.) And I have no doubt that it will happen again.
It leaves a cramping emptiness in me; a yearning to settle down, once and for all. It numbs any aspirations I may have to pursue job/career/identity at all cost. I realize that that is probably why I wanted to buy a house these past few months, despite it being in the wrong city (and for me, at least, at the wrong time) and it definitely explains why I cannot see myself living further from my family than I am now.
Ahh...but these are not thoughts for blogs...
This past few week has been a blur. Nightly events/dinners/parties with classmates. Over this past year, my class has come together closer and closer. We are so different and yet held together by this remarkable shared experience. I hope to see all of them again in my life.
On Saturday, we all donned black velvet robes and black caps with green tassels, and walked across the stage to get our green hoods and medical degrees. The Mondavi Center was filled with cheering family and friends, and each one of us was allowed to have two people join us on the stage when we received our diploma. We entered and left the ceremony in a procession led by bagpipes. Everyone was nervously ecstatic pretty much all the way through the day, and even when everything ended, there was still a sense of unfinished energy in the air.
I came home too exhausted to sleep that night, and now a strange few weeks have begun. I've rented a house to live in for the next year, but will go and travel a bit more before moving in next week. Meantime, many of my friends are leaving, and though most are staying relatively near, all of us know that the residency years to come will magnify any distance there is. I start my internship in the cardiac intensive care unit in a little over two weeks, and the gravity of that thought is nearly suffocating.
For now though, I'm taking everything a day at a time. Sleeping, spending time with family, letting a bit of the early summer sun warm my skin, and trying to remember to breathe...
Here are a few photos from graduation day:
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
photo (and video!) catch up
Just landed back on home soil last night. Don't have time to write my last post about India and Singapore right now, but will post a few photos as catch up for the other stories...
HUNGARY:
In Hungary, after SP finally joined us!
At the Balaton Lake (it's a bit nippy still)
A very impressive memorial to those who resisted the Communist government, particularly those lost in the 1956 revolution. Consists of individual pillars that progressively merge together into a solid front. You don't have to think hard to get the symbolism.
Memorial from another angle.
Budapest
POLAND
Biking in Gdansk
RAVENSBRUCK, GERMANY
The concentration camp, across the lake from the town of Furstenburg.
Memorial to the crematorium in front of the former camp wall, now called the Wall of Nations, which has the names of all the nations from which the women came.
The Roll Call Area, now also a memorial.
Women's Prison
Ravensbruck memorial.
BERLIN, GERMANY
SB eating a real German Burger at the May Day Festival
Between East and West Berlin
Holocaust memorial in Berlin
Walking amid the Holocaust memorial
Everyone needs one of these photos from Berlin
INDIA
(CLICK TO ENLARGE TO GET THE REAL EFFECT!)
City street from the bus window, soon after landing.
Our apartment building.
Playing Gin Rummy in our apartment.
View from our balcony
Visiting a small village with the REACH workers.
Going to Hydearbad for our weekend trip
Finally, on the streets of Hyderabad!
Most trucks in India are painted and decorated (many much fancier than this)
View from the Charminar onto the street below.
Buddha statue in the middle of Hyderabad's lake.
If you go down this Secunderbad street, take a left up a narrow alley and ascend the stairs to the second floor, you can find a little shop that sells nice pearls there and have a necklace made to your specification.
Visiting the tombs of Hyderabad's old sultans. Many people appear to come here on the weekends to picnic...
...and play a bit of cricket.
At the tombs, leave your shoes outside if you are going to go in. And oh yeah, only men allowed...except in the tomb the sultan built for his wife; anyone can go there.
Little boy waiting for dad to finish his prayers inside the mosque.
Golconda Fort
View from Golconda Fort
When your driver runs out of gas in India, you can always find a nice stranger in the street (or your med school dean) to push the car.
Some images of Hyderabad, Secunderbad and Cyberbad from the road:
(CLICK TO ENLARGE TO GET THE REAL EFFECT!)
And finally, some video bits (apologize for the poor quality)
Driving in Hyderabad: honking is the norm (all the time) and those little white lines in the middle of the road really don't mean anything.
Listening to Prabhakar's Indian rap:
Indian music playing in the background, windows down to let in the balmy night, and we're cruising - slowly - through the streets of Hyderabad, India.
HUNGARY:
In Hungary, after SP finally joined us!
At the Balaton Lake (it's a bit nippy still)
A very impressive memorial to those who resisted the Communist government, particularly those lost in the 1956 revolution. Consists of individual pillars that progressively merge together into a solid front. You don't have to think hard to get the symbolism.
Memorial from another angle.
Budapest
POLAND
Biking in Gdansk
RAVENSBRUCK, GERMANY
The concentration camp, across the lake from the town of Furstenburg.
Memorial to the crematorium in front of the former camp wall, now called the Wall of Nations, which has the names of all the nations from which the women came.
The Roll Call Area, now also a memorial.
Women's Prison
Ravensbruck memorial.
BERLIN, GERMANY
SB eating a real German Burger at the May Day Festival
Between East and West Berlin
Holocaust memorial in Berlin
Walking amid the Holocaust memorial
Everyone needs one of these photos from Berlin
INDIA
(CLICK TO ENLARGE TO GET THE REAL EFFECT!)
City street from the bus window, soon after landing.
Our apartment building.
Playing Gin Rummy in our apartment.
View from our balcony
Visiting a small village with the REACH workers.
Going to Hydearbad for our weekend trip
Finally, on the streets of Hyderabad!
Most trucks in India are painted and decorated (many much fancier than this)
View from the Charminar onto the street below.
Buddha statue in the middle of Hyderabad's lake.
If you go down this Secunderbad street, take a left up a narrow alley and ascend the stairs to the second floor, you can find a little shop that sells nice pearls there and have a necklace made to your specification.
Visiting the tombs of Hyderabad's old sultans. Many people appear to come here on the weekends to picnic...
...and play a bit of cricket.
At the tombs, leave your shoes outside if you are going to go in. And oh yeah, only men allowed...except in the tomb the sultan built for his wife; anyone can go there.
Little boy waiting for dad to finish his prayers inside the mosque.
Golconda Fort
View from Golconda Fort
When your driver runs out of gas in India, you can always find a nice stranger in the street (or your med school dean) to push the car.
Some images of Hyderabad, Secunderbad and Cyberbad from the road:
(CLICK TO ENLARGE TO GET THE REAL EFFECT!)
And finally, some video bits (apologize for the poor quality)
Driving in Hyderabad: honking is the norm (all the time) and those little white lines in the middle of the road really don't mean anything.
Listening to Prabhakar's Indian rap:
Indian music playing in the background, windows down to let in the balmy night, and we're cruising - slowly - through the streets of Hyderabad, India.
Friday, May 16, 2008
We've landed in Singapore. Staying at the Furama hotel in the center of the Chinatown in the city. We've got some fun things to do for the next few days, but I'll hopefully get a chance to finish the posts from the last few days in India. Here is one about our last weekend there:
*********
Saturday, May 10
On Saturday morning we hired a car and driver to take us to Hyderabad to do some shopping, eating and visiting of tourist sites. Our driver, a young local man named Prabhakar, spoke only slightly more words in English than we did in Telugu, Urdu or Hindi (the three languages he did speak), but he smiled a lot, and we smiled back, and things worked out very well. First on our agenda was to find a non-Indian restaurant after spending an entire week eating hospital cafeteria Indian food (much better than our hospital food, but a bit spicy and monotonous by the end of it.)
Hyderabad is not generally a tourist destination (and probably even less during the hottest month of the year). The 800+ page lonely planet guidebook that SP brought, has a total of 8 pages on Hyderabad and surrounding regions, and there are no better books available. Throughout our stay, we probably saw no more than 20 non-Indian people and most of that number was at the Golconda Fort, the biggest tourist destination here, which has an evening light show (so we were all there at once). You cannot buy real postcards here, though a few entrepreneurial people have managed to print out old pictures of Hyderabad --some of them remarkably unexciting (e.g. a picture of a skyscraper)-- on postcard-like paper and sell them in ten packs on the street. I paid far too much for mine, too happy to see postcards (after two days of searching) to haggle.
We started our day in the Abids area, where we felt we would have the best chance of finding a bank, an American restaurant, and a post office. It is the only post office in Hyderabad, and as we found out today, it is quite possibly the only place in this city from where one can send mail. Our driver dropped us off to search for parking, and after exchanging cell phone numbers, we had our first experience of walking on Hyderabad streets.
The traffic here is remarkable: thousands of cars, rickshaws, motorcycles, bicycles and pedestrians walk the roads at once. There are occasional sidewalks, but they are rare and narrow, and do not appear to be used by anyone other than people who beg or sleep on the street. There do not seem to be many traffic rules, and most people don't obey the ones there are (cars often run red lights en mass, sometimes because the light has just changed…a good 5 seconds ago, sometimes because they just feel like it). People also have a different sense of personal space. Everyone (whether in person or vehicle) appears to feel comfortable with being cramped in small spaces, so that if you are not following the car in front of you bumper to bumper, someone (first a motorcycle, then a rickshaw, then a truck) will eventually squeeze into that space. Often, when we were standing in line to buy something, people would just push right past us and take the personal space we had left in front of us as their own. Entire families would "cut" in line, quite possibly wondering to themselves what we were doing standing in line but going nowhere. Overtime, we learned that unless one made it physically impossible for a person to push himself past you, you will not get very far forward. Fortunately, we realized this after being here for more than a week, and after wearing the same clothes everyday, we had soaked up India -- its grease, sweat and smoke -- into ourselves, and we were much more comfortable standing in crowds.
Crossing the street in Abids was an adventure. There are a few crosswalks, but from having driven through the city already, we had no expectations that anyone would actually stop for us. We had sped past people attempting to cross the street - their noses or heels only inches from our car - and we knew it would be a mad dash each time. We survived; our white skin, female gender and western clothes probably made up for our inexperience, as many drivers would slow down to stare and yell "Pardon Madam" instead of clipping our heels.
The only place in Abids with the non-Indian food we craved was (yes, you guessed it) McDonalds. Our shame numbed by the need to eat some protein (I had started to eat mostly rice and bread, with a teaspoon of ridiculously spicy dal per meal) and ice cream, we went in and savored the air conditioning for a good hour.
The rest of our day was spent driving around the city and visiting the famous Hyderabad sites. We started at the Charminar, an ancient Muslim entrance to the city of Hyderabad that gave us a 360-degree view of the city, from about 6 or 7 stories up (which is pretty high around here). The Charminar is located in the Old Muslim Quarter of Hyderabad, and next to it is a famous bazaar that has narrow alleyways filled with hundreds of stores selling Bangles, Saris, fruits, and spices.
When we pulled up in rented Jeepesque SUV near the Charminar, a young boy stuck his head in our window and started to chat us up, first in English, then in French. He was 8 years old and sold cheap necklaces on the street, which he prominently displayed the entire time he talked with us. His name was Mazur, and soon, he was leading us around the street towards the Charminar itself, introducing us to the culture of the Bazaar: “People will try to cheat you here. Expensive for you, cheap for me. Don’t buy expensive. Ask for less.”
“Can we buy a necklace from you?” I asked.
“Not now, later. I will give you a good price. Not expensive. Good price. First go to the Charminar. Here is the entrance for foreigners. I will wait here.”
We followed Mazur’s instructions, paying the foreigner’s fee (which is 10 times the local price, but still costs around $2) and followed the crowds of Indian tourists to the top, up a steep, narrow spiral staircase that seemed coated with the city’s grime. There, we were unintentionally adopted by an unwanted guide, a man wearing a “Security” sweatshirt, who asked us if he could tell us about the history of the Charminar “You must know the history; it is important!”, and then 5 minutes later, asked us if he could tell us about his fee. Being that his fee was 5 rupees (about 12 cents), we had no problem paying it, and he did point our a structure or two for us to see. (The next day, at another tourist destination, we were stopped at a fake gate by a man who pretended to be checking our tickets, then pocketed them after we showed them to him, and asked us to follow us for a special tour. By the time we caught on to ask for our tickets back, he informed us that his fee was 350 rupees, and insisted that we would need his tour to get anything out of our visit: “But I will tell you history; the history is so important!” We said no thank you, and that’s when I bought the overpriced postcards from his friend.)
After seeing the Charminar, Mazur and Prabhakar (our driver, who we found out had secretly been following us to make sure we were OK) led us around the bazaar street that sold bangles. In every direction, there were thousands of shiny, glistening, colorful bangles (sorry, forgot to take pictures!) and in front of them, men yelled at us from every direction: “Come here, Madam!” “Just a second, Madam!” “Come look at these! I will give you a discount!” “Madam, just a moment! Please!”
It was overwhelming and not my ideal shopping environment, as I found a few moments later, when I bought ugly bangles for way too much money. After making my purchase, I turned around, and young Mazur was looking at me, disappointed and shaking his head. “Did I pay too much, Mazur? Should I have haggled more.” “Too expensive,” he simply said in a flat tone, as if I thoughtlessly wasted his precious instructions.
Seeing how overwhelmed we were by the bazaar (and probably also seeing that we weren’t interested in buying much, Prabhakar and Mazur steered us towards one of the side streets and into one of the quiet alleys of the neighborhood. There, we walked past small garage like buildings where all the artisans worked: in one, two men sat on the concrete floor, adding sequins, one by one, to a 6 yard long sari. In another, an old man was using tweezers to add little diamonds to a pricey gold bangle. In yet another, leather was being worked into the shape of a sandal.
After the Charminar, Mazur asked if he could go on with us to our next stop, Charmahala Palace, and jumped into the car to go with us, leaving his necklaces on the car seat. When we offered to pay the entrance fee for him and our driver, the guard, replied, “Oh no, you don’t have to pay for Mazur, he’s a big man around here!” Apparently, we weren’t the first tourists Mazur had charmed with his business savy manner.
We walked around the Palace grounds for a while, but it was blazingly hot, and the best part of the trip was sitting down with Mazur and Prabhakar for some cold sodas in the shade. Our day ended, with a trip to the biggest grocery store we could find – one only slightly bigger than a Trader Joes. It was inside of the mall in Abids, which –like all malls and most stores here – you couldn’t enter without passing security and a metal detector. Getting into the grocery store was just as difficult, but we happily left with water, mango juice and more Marie biscuits to prepare for another week away from the city.
Sunday, May 11
On Sunday, we returned to Hyderabad for a few more sites and a little bit more of American food. We started the day at the IMAX cinema and mall (yes, we’ve gone to more malls in these two days in India than I have all year in the USA, but our bellies were desperate.) The mall was a strange site to see in India. It was almost like an American mall, but it was clear that for many people who went there, it was a remarkable experience. There was a small climbing wall next to the entrance, and while one man attempted to scale it, another several dozen were frozen in awe. SB and I considered climbing for a moment, but didn't think it was appropriate in a country where women still have quite traditional roles. The most amusing part of the IMAX theater however, was the area with the escalator. Many people here had never been on moving stairs before, and SB said she could spend the rest of the day watching the mixture of trepidation, excitement and relief displayed by those who braved stepping onto their first escalator.
We ended our evening with a visit to the Golconda Fort, the large mountain side ruins of the former location of the city. Hyderabad was established in the end of the 17th century after the population at Golconda Fort exceeded the capacity (and ran out of water). The sultan at the time decided to move the city, and the fort was abandoned at the time. In the evenings each night, there is a "lightshow" at the fort, which you watch from chairs at the bottom of the mountain. The one hour program consists of a narrated story of the Fort's history, that is told with music and famous poems, while different parts of the fort are lit up.
We returned to our quarters late at night, with food and water for the week, relieved to have finally had a chance to experience and see the city.
*********
Saturday, May 10
On Saturday morning we hired a car and driver to take us to Hyderabad to do some shopping, eating and visiting of tourist sites. Our driver, a young local man named Prabhakar, spoke only slightly more words in English than we did in Telugu, Urdu or Hindi (the three languages he did speak), but he smiled a lot, and we smiled back, and things worked out very well. First on our agenda was to find a non-Indian restaurant after spending an entire week eating hospital cafeteria Indian food (much better than our hospital food, but a bit spicy and monotonous by the end of it.)
Hyderabad is not generally a tourist destination (and probably even less during the hottest month of the year). The 800+ page lonely planet guidebook that SP brought, has a total of 8 pages on Hyderabad and surrounding regions, and there are no better books available. Throughout our stay, we probably saw no more than 20 non-Indian people and most of that number was at the Golconda Fort, the biggest tourist destination here, which has an evening light show (so we were all there at once). You cannot buy real postcards here, though a few entrepreneurial people have managed to print out old pictures of Hyderabad --some of them remarkably unexciting (e.g. a picture of a skyscraper)-- on postcard-like paper and sell them in ten packs on the street. I paid far too much for mine, too happy to see postcards (after two days of searching) to haggle.
We started our day in the Abids area, where we felt we would have the best chance of finding a bank, an American restaurant, and a post office. It is the only post office in Hyderabad, and as we found out today, it is quite possibly the only place in this city from where one can send mail. Our driver dropped us off to search for parking, and after exchanging cell phone numbers, we had our first experience of walking on Hyderabad streets.
The traffic here is remarkable: thousands of cars, rickshaws, motorcycles, bicycles and pedestrians walk the roads at once. There are occasional sidewalks, but they are rare and narrow, and do not appear to be used by anyone other than people who beg or sleep on the street. There do not seem to be many traffic rules, and most people don't obey the ones there are (cars often run red lights en mass, sometimes because the light has just changed…a good 5 seconds ago, sometimes because they just feel like it). People also have a different sense of personal space. Everyone (whether in person or vehicle) appears to feel comfortable with being cramped in small spaces, so that if you are not following the car in front of you bumper to bumper, someone (first a motorcycle, then a rickshaw, then a truck) will eventually squeeze into that space. Often, when we were standing in line to buy something, people would just push right past us and take the personal space we had left in front of us as their own. Entire families would "cut" in line, quite possibly wondering to themselves what we were doing standing in line but going nowhere. Overtime, we learned that unless one made it physically impossible for a person to push himself past you, you will not get very far forward. Fortunately, we realized this after being here for more than a week, and after wearing the same clothes everyday, we had soaked up India -- its grease, sweat and smoke -- into ourselves, and we were much more comfortable standing in crowds.
Crossing the street in Abids was an adventure. There are a few crosswalks, but from having driven through the city already, we had no expectations that anyone would actually stop for us. We had sped past people attempting to cross the street - their noses or heels only inches from our car - and we knew it would be a mad dash each time. We survived; our white skin, female gender and western clothes probably made up for our inexperience, as many drivers would slow down to stare and yell "Pardon Madam" instead of clipping our heels.
The only place in Abids with the non-Indian food we craved was (yes, you guessed it) McDonalds. Our shame numbed by the need to eat some protein (I had started to eat mostly rice and bread, with a teaspoon of ridiculously spicy dal per meal) and ice cream, we went in and savored the air conditioning for a good hour.
The rest of our day was spent driving around the city and visiting the famous Hyderabad sites. We started at the Charminar, an ancient Muslim entrance to the city of Hyderabad that gave us a 360-degree view of the city, from about 6 or 7 stories up (which is pretty high around here). The Charminar is located in the Old Muslim Quarter of Hyderabad, and next to it is a famous bazaar that has narrow alleyways filled with hundreds of stores selling Bangles, Saris, fruits, and spices.
When we pulled up in rented Jeepesque SUV near the Charminar, a young boy stuck his head in our window and started to chat us up, first in English, then in French. He was 8 years old and sold cheap necklaces on the street, which he prominently displayed the entire time he talked with us. His name was Mazur, and soon, he was leading us around the street towards the Charminar itself, introducing us to the culture of the Bazaar: “People will try to cheat you here. Expensive for you, cheap for me. Don’t buy expensive. Ask for less.”
“Can we buy a necklace from you?” I asked.
“Not now, later. I will give you a good price. Not expensive. Good price. First go to the Charminar. Here is the entrance for foreigners. I will wait here.”
We followed Mazur’s instructions, paying the foreigner’s fee (which is 10 times the local price, but still costs around $2) and followed the crowds of Indian tourists to the top, up a steep, narrow spiral staircase that seemed coated with the city’s grime. There, we were unintentionally adopted by an unwanted guide, a man wearing a “Security” sweatshirt, who asked us if he could tell us about the history of the Charminar “You must know the history; it is important!”, and then 5 minutes later, asked us if he could tell us about his fee. Being that his fee was 5 rupees (about 12 cents), we had no problem paying it, and he did point our a structure or two for us to see. (The next day, at another tourist destination, we were stopped at a fake gate by a man who pretended to be checking our tickets, then pocketed them after we showed them to him, and asked us to follow us for a special tour. By the time we caught on to ask for our tickets back, he informed us that his fee was 350 rupees, and insisted that we would need his tour to get anything out of our visit: “But I will tell you history; the history is so important!” We said no thank you, and that’s when I bought the overpriced postcards from his friend.)
After seeing the Charminar, Mazur and Prabhakar (our driver, who we found out had secretly been following us to make sure we were OK) led us around the bazaar street that sold bangles. In every direction, there were thousands of shiny, glistening, colorful bangles (sorry, forgot to take pictures!) and in front of them, men yelled at us from every direction: “Come here, Madam!” “Just a second, Madam!” “Come look at these! I will give you a discount!” “Madam, just a moment! Please!”
It was overwhelming and not my ideal shopping environment, as I found a few moments later, when I bought ugly bangles for way too much money. After making my purchase, I turned around, and young Mazur was looking at me, disappointed and shaking his head. “Did I pay too much, Mazur? Should I have haggled more.” “Too expensive,” he simply said in a flat tone, as if I thoughtlessly wasted his precious instructions.
Seeing how overwhelmed we were by the bazaar (and probably also seeing that we weren’t interested in buying much, Prabhakar and Mazur steered us towards one of the side streets and into one of the quiet alleys of the neighborhood. There, we walked past small garage like buildings where all the artisans worked: in one, two men sat on the concrete floor, adding sequins, one by one, to a 6 yard long sari. In another, an old man was using tweezers to add little diamonds to a pricey gold bangle. In yet another, leather was being worked into the shape of a sandal.
After the Charminar, Mazur asked if he could go on with us to our next stop, Charmahala Palace, and jumped into the car to go with us, leaving his necklaces on the car seat. When we offered to pay the entrance fee for him and our driver, the guard, replied, “Oh no, you don’t have to pay for Mazur, he’s a big man around here!” Apparently, we weren’t the first tourists Mazur had charmed with his business savy manner.
We walked around the Palace grounds for a while, but it was blazingly hot, and the best part of the trip was sitting down with Mazur and Prabhakar for some cold sodas in the shade. Our day ended, with a trip to the biggest grocery store we could find – one only slightly bigger than a Trader Joes. It was inside of the mall in Abids, which –like all malls and most stores here – you couldn’t enter without passing security and a metal detector. Getting into the grocery store was just as difficult, but we happily left with water, mango juice and more Marie biscuits to prepare for another week away from the city.
Sunday, May 11
On Sunday, we returned to Hyderabad for a few more sites and a little bit more of American food. We started the day at the IMAX cinema and mall (yes, we’ve gone to more malls in these two days in India than I have all year in the USA, but our bellies were desperate.) The mall was a strange site to see in India. It was almost like an American mall, but it was clear that for many people who went there, it was a remarkable experience. There was a small climbing wall next to the entrance, and while one man attempted to scale it, another several dozen were frozen in awe. SB and I considered climbing for a moment, but didn't think it was appropriate in a country where women still have quite traditional roles. The most amusing part of the IMAX theater however, was the area with the escalator. Many people here had never been on moving stairs before, and SB said she could spend the rest of the day watching the mixture of trepidation, excitement and relief displayed by those who braved stepping onto their first escalator.
We ended our evening with a visit to the Golconda Fort, the large mountain side ruins of the former location of the city. Hyderabad was established in the end of the 17th century after the population at Golconda Fort exceeded the capacity (and ran out of water). The sultan at the time decided to move the city, and the fort was abandoned at the time. In the evenings each night, there is a "lightshow" at the fort, which you watch from chairs at the bottom of the mountain. The one hour program consists of a narrated story of the Fort's history, that is told with music and famous poems, while different parts of the fort are lit up.
We returned to our quarters late at night, with food and water for the week, relieved to have finally had a chance to experience and see the city.
Sunday, May 11, 2008
Photos!
We had an amazing time touring Hyderabad this weekend. So many impressions! I'll try to write about them tonight and post tomorrow. Thanks for all of your comments. It's nice to hear from home - and to know someone is reading all this!
Meanwhile, I've managed to upload a few photos to flickr. The connection here is very slow and gets interrupted frequently, so I couldn't get them onto this blog, but you can link to the photos HERE. More coming soon.
Meanwhile, I've managed to upload a few photos to flickr. The connection here is very slow and gets interrupted frequently, so I couldn't get them onto this blog, but you can link to the photos HERE. More coming soon.
Friday, May 09, 2008
A very long catch up post
Written Thursday, May 7 (Happy Anniversary K and J!), but I was not able to post it before the library closed.
It is now our fifth day in India. It has been an unique experience (or according to SB: "a great adventure"...and to SP a "a psychological test"). I'm still enjoying it, but I think every day, at least one of us momentarily loses our enthusiasm. We are definitely in rural India, during the hottest month of the year, when the rest of the country seems to have put everything on hold.
So where to start?
Maybe a bit about where we are and what were doing…
We are at a rural hospital about 2 hours from the city of Hyderabad. It is a recently opened 500-bed hospital that aims to serve the rural community in the surrounding areas. It was built about 15 years ago, but from what we understand, it has only been open for a bit over 5 years. For the first five years, the hospital provided free care to all patients, but has since had to start charging for diagnostic tests. It has all the services a large US hospital would have (a neonatal intensive care unit as a well as a pediatric ICU, surgical theaters, ophthalmology, cardiology, etc.), but – as the Indian doctors we’ve talked to have put it – it is definitely not as “posh” as US hospitals.
The hospital is at the end of a long dirt road and is surrounded by dry desert. The building itself is built to be open to the outside, with many of the hallways lacking outer walls. The wards often house 20-40 beds in each room, with a nursing station in the middle. They have screens on the open windows, but the doors are usually swung open onto the outside. There is no lack of fresh air. Though the hospital has 500-bed capacity, we have found that in most 40 bed wards, there are usually less than ten patients. Partly this is because this is a new hospital, partly because it serves a very poor and rural population that cannot afford care or even the transport necessary to take them there.
The hospital also houses a medical and nursing school, but the medical school is currently closed for vacation, which means that many of the services that cater to the 500 medical students are also closed. The building’s café is closed, the library (which has the much missed internet) keeps short hours and is not open on the weekends, and the people who would normally sell groceries or bottled water have no reason to do the two-hour drive in from town. What is open is the hospital canteen, which serves spicy Indian food for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and several chai tea stands found in the hallways, which provide yummy cups of chai for 3 rupees each.
People ask us what we are doing here, and it is a rather hard question to answer. We came to study the medical health system and specifically, to focus on treatment of alcoholism. In the process, we were also hoping to do medical rotations and learn a bit of medicine, as it is taught and done by other countries. A third (fourth?) goal of our trip was to come to this particular rural program in India, because our school is interested in establishing an exchange program with them. These goals, however, did not seem very compatible with each other, with the amount of time we had available, or with the time of year when we were able to come. The medical students are on vacation, so the hospital is far more rural and isolated than it normally is. The medical system functions differently, so medical students (even when they are here) have a much more passive role (they pre-round on the patients, round with the team in the morning until 12:30 and then go home to study). The area is so poor and rural, that alcoholism is not a significant issue, at least not when contrasted with everything else that the people must deal with.
*****
So we find ourselves a bit lost here, though still glad to have come. Our days begin with a spicy Indian breakfast (usually a flat bread with some curry) and chai, followed by the daily dose of malaria prophylaxis that has been upsetting my stomach. Then we set off for our meeting of the day with a department head, which lasts until 12:30 or so. They have so far been very interesting. After 12:30, we are done, and being in the middle of nowhere, with temperatures hitting well over 100F daily, we work hard to find things to occupy us in the heat. With the internet down the last few days, that has meant returning home after another spicy Indian meal for lunch and trying to stay cool. Each time we come home, we change out of our culturally appropriate clothes (slacks and shirt with short sleeves – though the women here all wear saris or pressed scrubs with buttoned white coats) into clothes we cannot be seen wearing in public (shorts or skirts and tank-tops).
Sometimes, we hide in the library a bit longer and study some medicine (parasitology has been the ongoing theme since we ran out of bottled water), but the library closes at four and the draw of tee-shirts and shorts and the fans in our rooms (or an occasional upset stomach) sends us back to our apartment. There we chat, take cold showers (SP chimes in here to say that she tries to imagine herself in a swimming pool), and spend the evening playing gin rummy (we are playing a continuous game, now well into 2000 points each, with SB in the lead).
Occasionally, our afternoon is briefly interrupted by a visit from the family who is in charge of cleaning our apartment building. They rap on our door softly, always a bit surprised to see us wearing the same scandalous clothes, but always with broad nonjudgmental smiles on their faces. They bow in deference continuously and I return the bows enthusiastically, uncomfortable with this caste system still seems to dominate all interactions in India’s rural areas. We go to dinner at 8, which is the earliest time that it is served in the canteen, and attempt to eat another spicy Indian meal before our evening game of gin rummy and bed.
We would be lying if we were to say that we have not had a hard time adjusting. The heat has been hard on SP, who hasn’t had full night of sleep since we got here, the medication we take for malaria prophylaxis has been giving me stomach upset and complete loss of appetite, and we are all having a hard time eating (very) spicy Indian food for every meal. Given our need to limit our baggage size and pack for winter and spring in Europe and summer in India (and given the cultural prohibitions that make it inappropriate for us to wear the few summer clothes we did bring), we will be wearing the same clothes for the next two weeks, washing undies and socks in the sink when necessary.
And finally, probably hardest of all, has been the need to adjust to the sanitation standards of India and to accept that it is quite possible that we will all be getting sick. When we left the States, we read about avoiding non-bottled water (even checking purchased bottles to make sure the seals weren’t broken), and not eating fresh fruits or vegetables that may have been washed with contaminated water. We learned that Indian toilets do not come equipped with toilet paper, and that the tradition has been to use a small bucket (provided in each bathroom) and one’s left hand for all the necessary toilet cleanings. (Yes, we did buy our own toilet paper!) The bathrooms sinks (even in the hospital) do not usually have soap (never towels), and some of them are just sinks, which drain onto the floor (splashing over your shoes and pants) and down the drain from there. People use their left hand for dirty activities (which has been a challenge for left-handed SB) and their right hand for clean ones, but we are not always able to decipher which is which. (For instance, they open the water tap with their left hand in order to wash their hands, but often close it with their right.) Diarrhea is a frequent experience by all and an important cause of child mortality, and amaebiasis in endemic in 20% of the population.
We ran out of bottled water on Monday (our guide thought it would be available for sale in the hospital, but since the students are gone, so are the merchants) and the hospital administrator convinced us that the hospital water was safe to drink. It is filtered by reverse osmosis, in the same way any of the water we were purchasing was. We could get the water any time of day in the water purification room, which was available to all the hospital staff, patients and their families. After much debate, we decided to drink the hospital water, our other alternative being the awkward process of asking someone who commuted to Hyderabad to purchase water for us. On our second or third visit to the humid hospital room where the water storage tank stood, we watched an elderly village man stick the mouth of his well-worn plastic water bottle directly against the spout of the water source, and thoughts of Typhoid Mary simultaneously sprung into our heads. We’ve since found a second source of water, which is near the library (and predominantly used by staff and nursing students), but every time one of us has an upset stomach or loose bowel movement, we have a worried discussion debating whether it is the food, the water, or the malaria pills.
Despite all the above, however, we are enjoying our “great adventure”, and have not lost our sense of humor. The other day, SP proposed that when we get back to the States, we host an Indian night, where we sit in dirty hot clothes covered in mosquito repellent, playing gin rummy, eating spicy Indian food and drinking water from a questionable water source. I can’t wait.
Some things we have seen and done
Now that I’ve had a chance to set the scene and give an exhaustive update of what runs through our heads in those many free hours we have during the day, I want to write about some of the awesome things we’ve had a chance to do and see.
We spent Tuesday morning visiting two local villages of Kandla Koya and Suthearaguda near Ghanpur with the MediCiti REACH team. The REACH project monitors the health of the 43,000 or so people who live in the nearby 41 villages. Each week, the team goes out to the villages and collects demographic data (births, deaths, pregnancies and marriages), provides missed immunizations, and educates mothers about the need for prenatal care. In each visit, the team contacts a community health volunteer who is responsible for gathering this information. While there, they also monitor the delivery of food and vitamins supplied by the state government to all village children under 6 years of age.
During our visit, we observed their weekly meetings, met with villagers and even got to go to a small village home and a volunteer-run preschool. The home was larger than average here, with three small rooms, cement walls, and a tile floor with a beautiful floor design. We sat in plastic patio chairs, while our guide discussed the week’s data numbers with the female health volunteer who lived there, the male head of the household looked uncomfortably at us, and his five daughters grinned, smiled and waved. I swore to myself that next time I am in such a position (hopefully I will be), I will have learned at least a few words and phrases in my host’s native language.
In the preschool, about 30 squirming children (age 2-5?) sat on little chairs against the wall, with small handheld blackboards in their laps, learning numbers and ABCs. Many were thrilled to practice "Hello Madam!" on us (some looking very surprised and happy with themselves that it produced the desired effect), though a few of the littlest ones looked quite frightened when we came in.
Sitting in Suthearaguda in 100F heat, watching children giggling at me and yelling "hello Madam" repeatedly, while an old woman sat and stared from her doorstep and men slowed down when they passed us on their mopeds, I definitely felt somewhat uncomfortable and lost. I was not able to communicate with anyone but our guide, who had a real job to do as well; and I could not really answer the curious stares of people who honestly (without any judgement) wanted to know what I was doing there. And of course really, I didn't have an explanation, or a role to play, other than (gulp) as a tourist, maybe, though not even, of a medical nature. Despite all that, however, I had multiple "pinch myself" moments, realizing that I was in India, in a rural village on the other side of the globe from home, and I felt really lucky to be there, to have that experience, even if awkwardly.
****
On Wednesday morning, we had the opportunity to meet with the head of the Psychiatry department, and chatted with him about treatment of alcoholism, the practice of psychiatry in India, religion and its role in treatment of psychiatric illness, religion and spirituality in general, literature, and the difficulty of publishing in India. We then took a tour of the psychiatric ward, which had only one patient in it that day: a man admitted for depression. He had presented to the hospital with abdominal pain, which was soon found to be psychosomatic in nature, and upon talking to our psychiatrist, had admitted suicidal ideation. He was depressed because he had lost his job and could not provide for his family. He was admitted into the inpatient ward, where he has now been for over a week, and started on anti-depressants. Two women stood at his bedside when we came in (wife and daughter or sister?) and looked on while the psychiatrist presented the patient’s case to us. It is not clear when he will be able to leave, but for now, the psychiatrist says, he has not improved. In India, a doctor has the right – with the family’s consent – to keep a patient who is sick at an inpatient psychiatric facility for 90 days. We ended our talk with some hot chai tea, and exchanged email addresses with our enthusiastic teacher.
****
Today, we toured the pediatric ward, neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) and pediatric intensive care unit (PICU). Our guide was again the head of the Pediatrics department (HOD), a calm, remarkably intelligent woman who enjoys teaching too much to retire. The unit doctor and two residents who took care of the patients, showed remarkable deference to her, softly answering “Yes, Ma’am” and “No, Ma’am” to every questions, and leading a wide path for her when we walked through the halls.
The first place we saw was the NICU, which was in an air-conditioned room at the end of a hallway of rooms for the staff and family to stay. In order to enter that hallway, we had to take off our shoes and either walk in barefoot or use borrowed flip-flops. (Most doctors here wear flipflops.) There were five babies there, most premature and underweight, but one with hyperbilirubinemia and one very sick baby with what appeared to be advanced meningitis. The residents presented each baby and the HOD calmly asked them questions and offered treatment suggestions. We next moved on to the PICU, which had one patient, an 8 year old boy who had just been admitted, likely with meningitis. He had altered sensorium and a positive Bruzdzinski sign, which the HOD elicited for us to see. The HOD ordered an LP and antibiotics, which we assumed could not be done without her approval.
We last visited the pediatric ward, which had several cases, all of them unique and interesting (there seems to be much more diversity here, with infectious disease and malnutrition cases we don’t see often in the US. One patient was an 8 month old with blindness, hypotonia, and athetosis. The baby had not changed since birth, but it was not clear why the mother did not bring him earlier, though cost, lack of education, and the young age of the child could all have been reasons. The mother denied a history of hyperbilirubinemia in the baby, and her other older child had normal development. The team decided that this is likely a case of cerebral palsy, for lack of a different explanation.
Another “diagnostic mystery” we saw was a 10 year old previously healthy young girl who presented lower extremity edema and fluid in her lungs. The team ruled out renal causes and the child responded well to diuresis. Her echocardiogram did not show signs of heart failure, endocarditis, valvular or other structural abnormalities, and she seemed to recover well. Prior to discharge, she was found to have weakness in her hands and legs and Guillain-Barre syndrome is now suspected. The presentation was given by one of the most quite of the residents and we could not understand what their next diagnostic plans were going to be.
Our morning in Pediatrics ended with a Grand Rounds talk about the use of Probiotics. The first half hour was a presentation of the evidence for the use of probiotics in medical treatment (for diarrhea and many other medical ailments). The second part of the talk was a ten minute marketing video presented by the pharmaceutical company that sponsored the talk, advertising their specific lab engineered Bacillus which could be used to treat diarrhea in lieu of antibiotics. This company not only sponsored the talk, but also gave us juice and cookies, which we’re really ashamed to say we ate, since it was the first juice and non-spicy food we had had in nearly a week.
Tomorrow, I will be visiting the Internal Medicine department, while SB and SP head off to surgery. On Saturday and Sunday, we have grand plans for visiting Hyderabad, not only to see another part of India, to visit some mosques, bazaars and temples, but also to buy some bottled water, stock up on powdered drinks we can add to that bottled water, and eat some non-Indian fare.
It is now our fifth day in India. It has been an unique experience (or according to SB: "a great adventure"...and to SP a "a psychological test"). I'm still enjoying it, but I think every day, at least one of us momentarily loses our enthusiasm. We are definitely in rural India, during the hottest month of the year, when the rest of the country seems to have put everything on hold.
So where to start?
Maybe a bit about where we are and what were doing…
We are at a rural hospital about 2 hours from the city of Hyderabad. It is a recently opened 500-bed hospital that aims to serve the rural community in the surrounding areas. It was built about 15 years ago, but from what we understand, it has only been open for a bit over 5 years. For the first five years, the hospital provided free care to all patients, but has since had to start charging for diagnostic tests. It has all the services a large US hospital would have (a neonatal intensive care unit as a well as a pediatric ICU, surgical theaters, ophthalmology, cardiology, etc.), but – as the Indian doctors we’ve talked to have put it – it is definitely not as “posh” as US hospitals.
The hospital is at the end of a long dirt road and is surrounded by dry desert. The building itself is built to be open to the outside, with many of the hallways lacking outer walls. The wards often house 20-40 beds in each room, with a nursing station in the middle. They have screens on the open windows, but the doors are usually swung open onto the outside. There is no lack of fresh air. Though the hospital has 500-bed capacity, we have found that in most 40 bed wards, there are usually less than ten patients. Partly this is because this is a new hospital, partly because it serves a very poor and rural population that cannot afford care or even the transport necessary to take them there.
The hospital also houses a medical and nursing school, but the medical school is currently closed for vacation, which means that many of the services that cater to the 500 medical students are also closed. The building’s café is closed, the library (which has the much missed internet) keeps short hours and is not open on the weekends, and the people who would normally sell groceries or bottled water have no reason to do the two-hour drive in from town. What is open is the hospital canteen, which serves spicy Indian food for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and several chai tea stands found in the hallways, which provide yummy cups of chai for 3 rupees each.
People ask us what we are doing here, and it is a rather hard question to answer. We came to study the medical health system and specifically, to focus on treatment of alcoholism. In the process, we were also hoping to do medical rotations and learn a bit of medicine, as it is taught and done by other countries. A third (fourth?) goal of our trip was to come to this particular rural program in India, because our school is interested in establishing an exchange program with them. These goals, however, did not seem very compatible with each other, with the amount of time we had available, or with the time of year when we were able to come. The medical students are on vacation, so the hospital is far more rural and isolated than it normally is. The medical system functions differently, so medical students (even when they are here) have a much more passive role (they pre-round on the patients, round with the team in the morning until 12:30 and then go home to study). The area is so poor and rural, that alcoholism is not a significant issue, at least not when contrasted with everything else that the people must deal with.
*****
So we find ourselves a bit lost here, though still glad to have come. Our days begin with a spicy Indian breakfast (usually a flat bread with some curry) and chai, followed by the daily dose of malaria prophylaxis that has been upsetting my stomach. Then we set off for our meeting of the day with a department head, which lasts until 12:30 or so. They have so far been very interesting. After 12:30, we are done, and being in the middle of nowhere, with temperatures hitting well over 100F daily, we work hard to find things to occupy us in the heat. With the internet down the last few days, that has meant returning home after another spicy Indian meal for lunch and trying to stay cool. Each time we come home, we change out of our culturally appropriate clothes (slacks and shirt with short sleeves – though the women here all wear saris or pressed scrubs with buttoned white coats) into clothes we cannot be seen wearing in public (shorts or skirts and tank-tops).
Sometimes, we hide in the library a bit longer and study some medicine (parasitology has been the ongoing theme since we ran out of bottled water), but the library closes at four and the draw of tee-shirts and shorts and the fans in our rooms (or an occasional upset stomach) sends us back to our apartment. There we chat, take cold showers (SP chimes in here to say that she tries to imagine herself in a swimming pool), and spend the evening playing gin rummy (we are playing a continuous game, now well into 2000 points each, with SB in the lead).
Occasionally, our afternoon is briefly interrupted by a visit from the family who is in charge of cleaning our apartment building. They rap on our door softly, always a bit surprised to see us wearing the same scandalous clothes, but always with broad nonjudgmental smiles on their faces. They bow in deference continuously and I return the bows enthusiastically, uncomfortable with this caste system still seems to dominate all interactions in India’s rural areas. We go to dinner at 8, which is the earliest time that it is served in the canteen, and attempt to eat another spicy Indian meal before our evening game of gin rummy and bed.
We would be lying if we were to say that we have not had a hard time adjusting. The heat has been hard on SP, who hasn’t had full night of sleep since we got here, the medication we take for malaria prophylaxis has been giving me stomach upset and complete loss of appetite, and we are all having a hard time eating (very) spicy Indian food for every meal. Given our need to limit our baggage size and pack for winter and spring in Europe and summer in India (and given the cultural prohibitions that make it inappropriate for us to wear the few summer clothes we did bring), we will be wearing the same clothes for the next two weeks, washing undies and socks in the sink when necessary.
And finally, probably hardest of all, has been the need to adjust to the sanitation standards of India and to accept that it is quite possible that we will all be getting sick. When we left the States, we read about avoiding non-bottled water (even checking purchased bottles to make sure the seals weren’t broken), and not eating fresh fruits or vegetables that may have been washed with contaminated water. We learned that Indian toilets do not come equipped with toilet paper, and that the tradition has been to use a small bucket (provided in each bathroom) and one’s left hand for all the necessary toilet cleanings. (Yes, we did buy our own toilet paper!) The bathrooms sinks (even in the hospital) do not usually have soap (never towels), and some of them are just sinks, which drain onto the floor (splashing over your shoes and pants) and down the drain from there. People use their left hand for dirty activities (which has been a challenge for left-handed SB) and their right hand for clean ones, but we are not always able to decipher which is which. (For instance, they open the water tap with their left hand in order to wash their hands, but often close it with their right.) Diarrhea is a frequent experience by all and an important cause of child mortality, and amaebiasis in endemic in 20% of the population.
We ran out of bottled water on Monday (our guide thought it would be available for sale in the hospital, but since the students are gone, so are the merchants) and the hospital administrator convinced us that the hospital water was safe to drink. It is filtered by reverse osmosis, in the same way any of the water we were purchasing was. We could get the water any time of day in the water purification room, which was available to all the hospital staff, patients and their families. After much debate, we decided to drink the hospital water, our other alternative being the awkward process of asking someone who commuted to Hyderabad to purchase water for us. On our second or third visit to the humid hospital room where the water storage tank stood, we watched an elderly village man stick the mouth of his well-worn plastic water bottle directly against the spout of the water source, and thoughts of Typhoid Mary simultaneously sprung into our heads. We’ve since found a second source of water, which is near the library (and predominantly used by staff and nursing students), but every time one of us has an upset stomach or loose bowel movement, we have a worried discussion debating whether it is the food, the water, or the malaria pills.
Despite all the above, however, we are enjoying our “great adventure”, and have not lost our sense of humor. The other day, SP proposed that when we get back to the States, we host an Indian night, where we sit in dirty hot clothes covered in mosquito repellent, playing gin rummy, eating spicy Indian food and drinking water from a questionable water source. I can’t wait.
Some things we have seen and done
Now that I’ve had a chance to set the scene and give an exhaustive update of what runs through our heads in those many free hours we have during the day, I want to write about some of the awesome things we’ve had a chance to do and see.
We spent Tuesday morning visiting two local villages of Kandla Koya and Suthearaguda near Ghanpur with the MediCiti REACH team. The REACH project monitors the health of the 43,000 or so people who live in the nearby 41 villages. Each week, the team goes out to the villages and collects demographic data (births, deaths, pregnancies and marriages), provides missed immunizations, and educates mothers about the need for prenatal care. In each visit, the team contacts a community health volunteer who is responsible for gathering this information. While there, they also monitor the delivery of food and vitamins supplied by the state government to all village children under 6 years of age.
During our visit, we observed their weekly meetings, met with villagers and even got to go to a small village home and a volunteer-run preschool. The home was larger than average here, with three small rooms, cement walls, and a tile floor with a beautiful floor design. We sat in plastic patio chairs, while our guide discussed the week’s data numbers with the female health volunteer who lived there, the male head of the household looked uncomfortably at us, and his five daughters grinned, smiled and waved. I swore to myself that next time I am in such a position (hopefully I will be), I will have learned at least a few words and phrases in my host’s native language.
In the preschool, about 30 squirming children (age 2-5?) sat on little chairs against the wall, with small handheld blackboards in their laps, learning numbers and ABCs. Many were thrilled to practice "Hello Madam!" on us (some looking very surprised and happy with themselves that it produced the desired effect), though a few of the littlest ones looked quite frightened when we came in.
Sitting in Suthearaguda in 100F heat, watching children giggling at me and yelling "hello Madam" repeatedly, while an old woman sat and stared from her doorstep and men slowed down when they passed us on their mopeds, I definitely felt somewhat uncomfortable and lost. I was not able to communicate with anyone but our guide, who had a real job to do as well; and I could not really answer the curious stares of people who honestly (without any judgement) wanted to know what I was doing there. And of course really, I didn't have an explanation, or a role to play, other than (gulp) as a tourist, maybe, though not even, of a medical nature. Despite all that, however, I had multiple "pinch myself" moments, realizing that I was in India, in a rural village on the other side of the globe from home, and I felt really lucky to be there, to have that experience, even if awkwardly.
****
On Wednesday morning, we had the opportunity to meet with the head of the Psychiatry department, and chatted with him about treatment of alcoholism, the practice of psychiatry in India, religion and its role in treatment of psychiatric illness, religion and spirituality in general, literature, and the difficulty of publishing in India. We then took a tour of the psychiatric ward, which had only one patient in it that day: a man admitted for depression. He had presented to the hospital with abdominal pain, which was soon found to be psychosomatic in nature, and upon talking to our psychiatrist, had admitted suicidal ideation. He was depressed because he had lost his job and could not provide for his family. He was admitted into the inpatient ward, where he has now been for over a week, and started on anti-depressants. Two women stood at his bedside when we came in (wife and daughter or sister?) and looked on while the psychiatrist presented the patient’s case to us. It is not clear when he will be able to leave, but for now, the psychiatrist says, he has not improved. In India, a doctor has the right – with the family’s consent – to keep a patient who is sick at an inpatient psychiatric facility for 90 days. We ended our talk with some hot chai tea, and exchanged email addresses with our enthusiastic teacher.
****
Today, we toured the pediatric ward, neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) and pediatric intensive care unit (PICU). Our guide was again the head of the Pediatrics department (HOD), a calm, remarkably intelligent woman who enjoys teaching too much to retire. The unit doctor and two residents who took care of the patients, showed remarkable deference to her, softly answering “Yes, Ma’am” and “No, Ma’am” to every questions, and leading a wide path for her when we walked through the halls.
The first place we saw was the NICU, which was in an air-conditioned room at the end of a hallway of rooms for the staff and family to stay. In order to enter that hallway, we had to take off our shoes and either walk in barefoot or use borrowed flip-flops. (Most doctors here wear flipflops.) There were five babies there, most premature and underweight, but one with hyperbilirubinemia and one very sick baby with what appeared to be advanced meningitis. The residents presented each baby and the HOD calmly asked them questions and offered treatment suggestions. We next moved on to the PICU, which had one patient, an 8 year old boy who had just been admitted, likely with meningitis. He had altered sensorium and a positive Bruzdzinski sign, which the HOD elicited for us to see. The HOD ordered an LP and antibiotics, which we assumed could not be done without her approval.
We last visited the pediatric ward, which had several cases, all of them unique and interesting (there seems to be much more diversity here, with infectious disease and malnutrition cases we don’t see often in the US. One patient was an 8 month old with blindness, hypotonia, and athetosis. The baby had not changed since birth, but it was not clear why the mother did not bring him earlier, though cost, lack of education, and the young age of the child could all have been reasons. The mother denied a history of hyperbilirubinemia in the baby, and her other older child had normal development. The team decided that this is likely a case of cerebral palsy, for lack of a different explanation.
Another “diagnostic mystery” we saw was a 10 year old previously healthy young girl who presented lower extremity edema and fluid in her lungs. The team ruled out renal causes and the child responded well to diuresis. Her echocardiogram did not show signs of heart failure, endocarditis, valvular or other structural abnormalities, and she seemed to recover well. Prior to discharge, she was found to have weakness in her hands and legs and Guillain-Barre syndrome is now suspected. The presentation was given by one of the most quite of the residents and we could not understand what their next diagnostic plans were going to be.
Our morning in Pediatrics ended with a Grand Rounds talk about the use of Probiotics. The first half hour was a presentation of the evidence for the use of probiotics in medical treatment (for diarrhea and many other medical ailments). The second part of the talk was a ten minute marketing video presented by the pharmaceutical company that sponsored the talk, advertising their specific lab engineered Bacillus which could be used to treat diarrhea in lieu of antibiotics. This company not only sponsored the talk, but also gave us juice and cookies, which we’re really ashamed to say we ate, since it was the first juice and non-spicy food we had had in nearly a week.
Tomorrow, I will be visiting the Internal Medicine department, while SB and SP head off to surgery. On Saturday and Sunday, we have grand plans for visiting Hyderabad, not only to see another part of India, to visit some mosques, bazaars and temples, but also to buy some bottled water, stock up on powdered drinks we can add to that bottled water, and eat some non-Indian fare.
Thursday, May 08, 2008
Hello from India
Hello from India. It is the fifth day of our stay here and the internet is up and working in the hospital library after three days so I can finally post. If you wish to catch up in order (which will probably make more sense, for those of you who actually have such time...why are you on this blog in the first place, eh?) I recommend scrolling down to the "Last days in Poland" entry and starting there. I will write again soon...
First day in India
I am sitting at a small desk in our bare three-room apartment in the Staff Quarters building on the campus of the MediCity Institute of Medical Sciences rural medical school. We are just outside the small village of Ghanpur, about 50 km northeast of Hyderabad, India, which is about a 2 hour drive on crowded streets and bumpy dirt roads. I’m writing on SB’s computer, hoping to post this blog when I get the chance. We don’t have a phone here, but there is internet in the Hospital’s library, which will be open on Monday.
After more than 24 hours of travel from Berlin (via London and Mumbai), we arrived at the Hyderabad airport in north-central India. As instructed by the man helping to organize our trip, we took the AeroExpress bus from the airport to Keyes High School in the neighboring city of Secunderbad. The ride was probably one of the best introductions to India we could have had.
With the horn honking every time our bus made a turn or passed another rickshaw or car (pretty much once a second), we drove for the next 80 minutes through the small streets of Hyderabad and Secunderbad. At first, we mostly passed old one-story shacks and buildings, nearly each one open like a garage (with a similar garage like door), selling goods at the edge of the street. Inside, sat old men smoking pipes, children playing games, women cleaning pots. One building after another, nearly all attached, in a long unending line, we likely passed hundreds of these. Later, as we descended lower into the city and the buildings got larger, we passed half-fallen buildings, with rubble left where it lay, where the rooms that remained standing had been converted into store fronts as well. Some of the buildings just had the front wall missing, possibly after an old earthquake, some of them three stories tall, with all rooms exposed to the street. We passed tent cities and shack towns, but mostly every single space we saw was occupied by storefronts selling goods or carts selling bananas and mangos.
There were, as one hears about India, people everywhere. The cities of Hyderabad and Secunderbad have large populations of Muslims, as well as Hindus, and in our journey, we went through sections that seemed predominated by one group or the other, but usually the people were quite mixed. In the higher regions of the city at the beginning of our ride, most of the women wore black burkas, covering everything but their beautifully painted eyes (I did see quite a few of them on remarkably high and fancy high heels, however). The men mostly wore muslim caps and sarong like white fabric around their waist, though there was a lot more diversity in their dress. Lower down in the city we passed women in an beautifully colored saris (not one seemed the same), and men in western clothes.
It is impossible to describe the sites that we saw: throngs of people, in a burst of colorful clothing on every edge of the street; food booths with heaping noodle dishes and curries; naked children with swollen bellies running among the tent cities; rickshaws overflowing with people racing three or four to a lane; hundreds or thousands of motorcycles, usually with several passengers on them (the women always gracefully sitting sideways and somehow not falling off); fires on the side of the street; hundreds of mango stands; and the thick smoggy and smoky air that made our eyes burn.
We arrived at Keyes High School right at the end of dusk. It was really a large bus stop in the middle of a very busy four-lane road, and nothing nearby resembling a high school. There were crowds of people everywhere, speeding/honking rush hour traffic, bustling storefronts in all directions, and again, that thick dust and smoke that made the whole seen a bit surreal. As we climbed down the bus stairs, we were greeted by taxi drivers who were all anxiously calling out to us to offer a ride. Among the crowd, I spotted a man who was mouthing to us: “Mediciti?”, and --just slightly relieved-- I said yes. He informed us that the rest of our journey – another hour – would be in the back of the hospital van. This was good to hear, as I was really not ready to stop seeing the sites. As we sped across the busy narrow roads, hoking until our horn stopped working, I realized that during our entire journey we had not passed a stop sign or streetlight. Throngs of rickshaws, bicycles, walking pedestrians, motorcycles and the occasional car filled every street, and at each intersection, with a whole lot of hoking, somehow everyone made it across. Harder yet, was being a single car trying to make a right turn through traffic (people drive on the left side of the road here, as in England) or cross traffic on foot as we did when we stopped to buy food and water at a small grocery store. But somehow it seemed to work.
We made it to our dormitory about 3 hours after leaving the airport and got a quick tour of the surrounding facilities before our driver had to leave to head back home. Situated in the dusty, high-dessert like town of Ghanpur, which appears to be on some sort of large mountain (we have no idea where we are!), the Mediciti hospital, medical school and dormitories stand in a complex along a dirt road. The hospital and medical school building are all half-open, with outside halls and rooms closed by padlocks. Everything is bare here, as one would expect: empty rooms with cement tile floors and little furniture, an empty elevator shaft, dirt paths and dirt roads.
Everywhere around us is high desert, with occasional cattle grazing on the nearby shrubs and wild dogs resting under trees. Our apartment is on the third floor, has a balcony, which I excitedly sit on for a few minutes until I remember that it’s a freaking 110 degrees or so (40-45C said our host). We have fans in every room and the hosts have graciously somehow got their hands on air coolers (something like a step below an AC) for us, which we use at night to cool off the rooms for sleep. The shower only has cold water, which in this weather is a wonderful relief.
Today is a holiday for everyone (we don’t know what kind, but it is Sunday) and we have just found out that from May 1-30, all the medical students go home for vacation, so it will just be us and the real doctors who work at the hospital (“you are doctors, aren’t you?” asked our host soon after picking us up.) There is no functioning phone anywhere in the building (there is possibly one at the guard house), but there does seem to be wiring for cable internet to all the apartments in our building (however, not to ours.) I called my parents on SB’s cell phone (which seems to work everywhere!) last night so that they wouldn’t have a heart attack, but other than that, I have no idea when we will be able communicate again or when I will be able to publish this blog.
Given that we are in the middle of nowhere, and our hosts have gone home to their families, we are taking the day to rest and catch up on sleep (and blogging). Every few hours we walk out of the living complex, past the smiling, sometimes puzzled guards, to the nearby hospital canteen (past the smiling/puzzled guards who guard the hospital) for our meals. We’re not sure what we can safely eat or not, so we’re sticking to rice and spicy cooked vegetarian foods for all meals, which is fortunately all they serve.
Nearly everyone we interact with – so far only guards and kitchen cooks—speaks very limited English or none at all. Our Hindi –I studied it on a video game on the plane while flying to India (I love Jet Air), but my remote broke after about 20 minutes—consists only of the numbers 1-7, which I plan to put to great use. Hand/head communication is also limited given that shaking your head ‘no’ can mean either yes or no. As we walk to and from the canteen, young women in beautiful saris and young men in western clothes, walk past us smiling, giggling and pointing, and we try to smile back, without looking too enthusiastic about our own presence.
Tomorrow, we will meet with our hosts in the morning to plan the rest of our stay and rotations. Our only anxiety at this point is that they will actually expect us to be real doctors.
After more than 24 hours of travel from Berlin (via London and Mumbai), we arrived at the Hyderabad airport in north-central India. As instructed by the man helping to organize our trip, we took the AeroExpress bus from the airport to Keyes High School in the neighboring city of Secunderbad. The ride was probably one of the best introductions to India we could have had.
With the horn honking every time our bus made a turn or passed another rickshaw or car (pretty much once a second), we drove for the next 80 minutes through the small streets of Hyderabad and Secunderbad. At first, we mostly passed old one-story shacks and buildings, nearly each one open like a garage (with a similar garage like door), selling goods at the edge of the street. Inside, sat old men smoking pipes, children playing games, women cleaning pots. One building after another, nearly all attached, in a long unending line, we likely passed hundreds of these. Later, as we descended lower into the city and the buildings got larger, we passed half-fallen buildings, with rubble left where it lay, where the rooms that remained standing had been converted into store fronts as well. Some of the buildings just had the front wall missing, possibly after an old earthquake, some of them three stories tall, with all rooms exposed to the street. We passed tent cities and shack towns, but mostly every single space we saw was occupied by storefronts selling goods or carts selling bananas and mangos.
There were, as one hears about India, people everywhere. The cities of Hyderabad and Secunderbad have large populations of Muslims, as well as Hindus, and in our journey, we went through sections that seemed predominated by one group or the other, but usually the people were quite mixed. In the higher regions of the city at the beginning of our ride, most of the women wore black burkas, covering everything but their beautifully painted eyes (I did see quite a few of them on remarkably high and fancy high heels, however). The men mostly wore muslim caps and sarong like white fabric around their waist, though there was a lot more diversity in their dress. Lower down in the city we passed women in an beautifully colored saris (not one seemed the same), and men in western clothes.
It is impossible to describe the sites that we saw: throngs of people, in a burst of colorful clothing on every edge of the street; food booths with heaping noodle dishes and curries; naked children with swollen bellies running among the tent cities; rickshaws overflowing with people racing three or four to a lane; hundreds or thousands of motorcycles, usually with several passengers on them (the women always gracefully sitting sideways and somehow not falling off); fires on the side of the street; hundreds of mango stands; and the thick smoggy and smoky air that made our eyes burn.
We arrived at Keyes High School right at the end of dusk. It was really a large bus stop in the middle of a very busy four-lane road, and nothing nearby resembling a high school. There were crowds of people everywhere, speeding/honking rush hour traffic, bustling storefronts in all directions, and again, that thick dust and smoke that made the whole seen a bit surreal. As we climbed down the bus stairs, we were greeted by taxi drivers who were all anxiously calling out to us to offer a ride. Among the crowd, I spotted a man who was mouthing to us: “Mediciti?”, and --just slightly relieved-- I said yes. He informed us that the rest of our journey – another hour – would be in the back of the hospital van. This was good to hear, as I was really not ready to stop seeing the sites. As we sped across the busy narrow roads, hoking until our horn stopped working, I realized that during our entire journey we had not passed a stop sign or streetlight. Throngs of rickshaws, bicycles, walking pedestrians, motorcycles and the occasional car filled every street, and at each intersection, with a whole lot of hoking, somehow everyone made it across. Harder yet, was being a single car trying to make a right turn through traffic (people drive on the left side of the road here, as in England) or cross traffic on foot as we did when we stopped to buy food and water at a small grocery store. But somehow it seemed to work.
We made it to our dormitory about 3 hours after leaving the airport and got a quick tour of the surrounding facilities before our driver had to leave to head back home. Situated in the dusty, high-dessert like town of Ghanpur, which appears to be on some sort of large mountain (we have no idea where we are!), the Mediciti hospital, medical school and dormitories stand in a complex along a dirt road. The hospital and medical school building are all half-open, with outside halls and rooms closed by padlocks. Everything is bare here, as one would expect: empty rooms with cement tile floors and little furniture, an empty elevator shaft, dirt paths and dirt roads.
Everywhere around us is high desert, with occasional cattle grazing on the nearby shrubs and wild dogs resting under trees. Our apartment is on the third floor, has a balcony, which I excitedly sit on for a few minutes until I remember that it’s a freaking 110 degrees or so (40-45C said our host). We have fans in every room and the hosts have graciously somehow got their hands on air coolers (something like a step below an AC) for us, which we use at night to cool off the rooms for sleep. The shower only has cold water, which in this weather is a wonderful relief.
Today is a holiday for everyone (we don’t know what kind, but it is Sunday) and we have just found out that from May 1-30, all the medical students go home for vacation, so it will just be us and the real doctors who work at the hospital (“you are doctors, aren’t you?” asked our host soon after picking us up.) There is no functioning phone anywhere in the building (there is possibly one at the guard house), but there does seem to be wiring for cable internet to all the apartments in our building (however, not to ours.) I called my parents on SB’s cell phone (which seems to work everywhere!) last night so that they wouldn’t have a heart attack, but other than that, I have no idea when we will be able communicate again or when I will be able to publish this blog.
Given that we are in the middle of nowhere, and our hosts have gone home to their families, we are taking the day to rest and catch up on sleep (and blogging). Every few hours we walk out of the living complex, past the smiling, sometimes puzzled guards, to the nearby hospital canteen (past the smiling/puzzled guards who guard the hospital) for our meals. We’re not sure what we can safely eat or not, so we’re sticking to rice and spicy cooked vegetarian foods for all meals, which is fortunately all they serve.
Nearly everyone we interact with – so far only guards and kitchen cooks—speaks very limited English or none at all. Our Hindi –I studied it on a video game on the plane while flying to India (I love Jet Air), but my remote broke after about 20 minutes—consists only of the numbers 1-7, which I plan to put to great use. Hand/head communication is also limited given that shaking your head ‘no’ can mean either yes or no. As we walk to and from the canteen, young women in beautiful saris and young men in western clothes, walk past us smiling, giggling and pointing, and we try to smile back, without looking too enthusiastic about our own presence.
Tomorrow, we will meet with our hosts in the morning to plan the rest of our stay and rotations. Our only anxiety at this point is that they will actually expect us to be real doctors.
Berlin
After returning from Furstenberg, SB and I cleared our minds by walking around the beautiful city of Berlin. Our hostel was located in the East Berlin area of Mitte, which means middle, and was close to everything. Unified with West Berlin at the end of 1989, East Berlin, especially near the borders of the former wall, has changed dramatically. New architecturally stunning buildings have sprung up everywhere, and many of those that remain are the old beautiful ones like the Parliament. Preserved as well are the wide-open parks, boulevards, and squares that do not give you the feeling of closeness and claustrophobia of many large cities.
Returning from the enormous new Hauptbahnhof train station, we walked along the Spree river, past the enormous government buildings which appeared to be constructed purely for the chance to be featured in architecture magazines. Soon after passing a statue of Virchow, we happened to come across a large medical school, and could not resist checking out the german-language textbooks inside. After a brief visit to our hostel on Chausseestr, we headed out for Oranienburger Str, only a 15 minute walk away, which is famous for its restaurants, courtyards and nightlife. Given our 5-week history of European food, we dined on some Sushi, which was not so bad, considering we were in Germany and several hundred kilometers away from the sea. We ended the evening with a walk to Alexanderplatz, to stand before the 207-meter high Fernsehturm TV tower, which has now become a popular symbol of East Berlin (though it was previously a hated symbol erected by the Communists).
The next morning, we set off to see Berlin. We walked the Under den Linden, the historically fashionable avenue of East Berlin filled with stores (now mostly full of Berlin souvenirs) and embassies, to the beautiful Tiergarden. Passing though the famous Brandenburg Gate (built in 1791 along with 18 other gates into the city, and converted into an East-West crossing point after the wall was built), we walked into a lively May 1st festival and political rally. Crowds filled the Plaza des 18 Marz and streamed down the closed off Street des 17 Juni. Police were visible everywhere, but completely not needed. There was a stage where enthusiastic speeches were being made (which I didn’t understand), people with political signs for the socialist party, and many political booths, including those advocating for fair treatment of workers, for immigration and gay rights, for unions, and many others. The rest of the area was filled with booths selling sausages, burgers, pretzels, ice cream and beer. We decided to return to our city tour and come back for the end of the day.
Setting off back towards the city, SB skillfully steered us through all the must-see spots, including Potsdamer Platz, a preserved section of the Berlin Wall with the Topographie des Terrors display, and Checkpoint Charlie. The Topographie display was on the transported ruins of an old SS building, next to the preserved part of the wall, and displayed posters and photographs documenting the rise of the Nazi regime and the subsequent war and Holocaust. It did a great job of showing just how slowly and innocuously the Nazi campaigns started, in the very early 1930s, and how quickly the persecution accelerated. Already in 1933 and 1934 – 6 years before the war began – Jews living in Germany were being slowly denied rights and Germans who opposed these policies were sent to prisons and even concentration camps (the first ones were built in Germany in 1934). Communists and Socialists were imprisoned and tortured. People who disobeyed laws ordering them to discriminate against the Jews were imprisoned. Hundreds of people were executed, often publically, for working against the Nazi party. By 1939, the SS (Nazi secret police) was a well-tuned and enormous organization, with thousands of officers. After six years of terror and the firm establishment of a political juggernaut that severely punished any opposition, it is easier to understand why Germans who did not want the war to happen had no chance in stopping it.
Checkpoint Charlie was a bit overwhelming. There were swarms of tourists and tourist stores, with just the original checkpoint station and sign preserved. The surrounding streets, however, were lined with posters describing the history of the Berlin wall, which we managed to mostly read (though we were pretty tired of reading by this point.) Ready for a rest, we returned to the festival/rally at Tiergarden. There, we bought some beer and good German burgers (a 1-inch thick chunk of seasoned ground meat barbecued over a huge outside charcoal grill) and listened to an outstanding German cover band play every popular European and American rock tune. One of my favorite ones was the pop tune about German reunification, which the entire crowd sang along with enthusiastically, which was cool to see 20 years later (and only 20 feet away from the remnants of the wall.) At the end of the festival, the bandleader said something that SB tried to translate as best as she could, about being peaceful and good to each other, so the rest of the world could see what a happy and peaceful nation Germany has become.
We ended our tour with a walk through the amazing Berlin Holocaust memorial (google it), constructed with 1000s of car-sized cement blocks standing next to each other like a city you could walk through. Despite having visited the Terror Museum in Budapest, Ravensbruck concentration camp, and the Topographie at the wall, we descended numbly into the Holocaust museum below the memorial, for one last painful look at the kind of suffering people are capable of inflicting on each other. The museum was beautifully done, but we really couldn’t stay very long.
Returning from the enormous new Hauptbahnhof train station, we walked along the Spree river, past the enormous government buildings which appeared to be constructed purely for the chance to be featured in architecture magazines. Soon after passing a statue of Virchow, we happened to come across a large medical school, and could not resist checking out the german-language textbooks inside. After a brief visit to our hostel on Chausseestr, we headed out for Oranienburger Str, only a 15 minute walk away, which is famous for its restaurants, courtyards and nightlife. Given our 5-week history of European food, we dined on some Sushi, which was not so bad, considering we were in Germany and several hundred kilometers away from the sea. We ended the evening with a walk to Alexanderplatz, to stand before the 207-meter high Fernsehturm TV tower, which has now become a popular symbol of East Berlin (though it was previously a hated symbol erected by the Communists).
The next morning, we set off to see Berlin. We walked the Under den Linden, the historically fashionable avenue of East Berlin filled with stores (now mostly full of Berlin souvenirs) and embassies, to the beautiful Tiergarden. Passing though the famous Brandenburg Gate (built in 1791 along with 18 other gates into the city, and converted into an East-West crossing point after the wall was built), we walked into a lively May 1st festival and political rally. Crowds filled the Plaza des 18 Marz and streamed down the closed off Street des 17 Juni. Police were visible everywhere, but completely not needed. There was a stage where enthusiastic speeches were being made (which I didn’t understand), people with political signs for the socialist party, and many political booths, including those advocating for fair treatment of workers, for immigration and gay rights, for unions, and many others. The rest of the area was filled with booths selling sausages, burgers, pretzels, ice cream and beer. We decided to return to our city tour and come back for the end of the day.
Setting off back towards the city, SB skillfully steered us through all the must-see spots, including Potsdamer Platz, a preserved section of the Berlin Wall with the Topographie des Terrors display, and Checkpoint Charlie. The Topographie display was on the transported ruins of an old SS building, next to the preserved part of the wall, and displayed posters and photographs documenting the rise of the Nazi regime and the subsequent war and Holocaust. It did a great job of showing just how slowly and innocuously the Nazi campaigns started, in the very early 1930s, and how quickly the persecution accelerated. Already in 1933 and 1934 – 6 years before the war began – Jews living in Germany were being slowly denied rights and Germans who opposed these policies were sent to prisons and even concentration camps (the first ones were built in Germany in 1934). Communists and Socialists were imprisoned and tortured. People who disobeyed laws ordering them to discriminate against the Jews were imprisoned. Hundreds of people were executed, often publically, for working against the Nazi party. By 1939, the SS (Nazi secret police) was a well-tuned and enormous organization, with thousands of officers. After six years of terror and the firm establishment of a political juggernaut that severely punished any opposition, it is easier to understand why Germans who did not want the war to happen had no chance in stopping it.
Checkpoint Charlie was a bit overwhelming. There were swarms of tourists and tourist stores, with just the original checkpoint station and sign preserved. The surrounding streets, however, were lined with posters describing the history of the Berlin wall, which we managed to mostly read (though we were pretty tired of reading by this point.) Ready for a rest, we returned to the festival/rally at Tiergarden. There, we bought some beer and good German burgers (a 1-inch thick chunk of seasoned ground meat barbecued over a huge outside charcoal grill) and listened to an outstanding German cover band play every popular European and American rock tune. One of my favorite ones was the pop tune about German reunification, which the entire crowd sang along with enthusiastically, which was cool to see 20 years later (and only 20 feet away from the remnants of the wall.) At the end of the festival, the bandleader said something that SB tried to translate as best as she could, about being peaceful and good to each other, so the rest of the world could see what a happy and peaceful nation Germany has become.
We ended our tour with a walk through the amazing Berlin Holocaust memorial (google it), constructed with 1000s of car-sized cement blocks standing next to each other like a city you could walk through. Despite having visited the Terror Museum in Budapest, Ravensbruck concentration camp, and the Topographie at the wall, we descended numbly into the Holocaust museum below the memorial, for one last painful look at the kind of suffering people are capable of inflicting on each other. The museum was beautifully done, but we really couldn’t stay very long.
Ravensbruck
On Tuesday morning, SB and I arrived by overnight train to Berlin and, soon after dropping off our bags at our hostel, headed out on the one-hour train from Hautbahnhof to the little town of Furstenberg. Furstenberg, situated near two lakes, is a very quaint, small town and popular set off point for bike rides and hikes along the nearby forest trails. It is also a kilometer from the Ravensbruck concentration camp, which is where we were going.
Ravensbruck concentration camp was primarily a women’s concentration camp that opened in Germany in 1939. Among the 130,000 women, children and men who were held there, was my grandmother, her three friends, and, as we recently found out, the aunt of our Polish friends in the USA. While it was functioning, the camp held Jewish and Roma/Sinti women (most of whom were shipped off to Auschwitz in 1942) and political prisoners from all over Europe. The camp functioned primarily as a work camp, where the prisoners were forced to work from early morning to night on meager rations and allowed to die of starvation or illness if they were not hardy enough. Over time, however, the camp also built a gas chamber, to which the sickest prisoners were sent.
My grandmother survived, as did the three women she met there who became her lifelong friends. Our friends’ aunt did not, and I found her name in a book honoring all prisoners who had died there. We had met our Polish friends in California many years after moving there from Poland, yet strangely, as my mom and I researched this trip to Ravensbruck, we found out that their aunt, Zofia Gapinska, had shared the same transport train to Ravensbruck that my grandmother had been on. Zofia’s number was 11235, my grandmother’s 11314, her friend Janina’s was 11310 and Maria’s was 7888. Maria’s number is lower because she arrived in 1941. My grandmother, Janina, and Zofia all arrived on May 31, 1942 on the Lublin-Warszawa transport. Zofia died sometime in the Winter of 1944 or 45, but the records aren’t clear since the Germans destroyed many records before the war ended. My grandmother and her friends -- all sick and near starvation -- were liberated by the allies in April of 1945. It is strange to think that Zofia must have known them, and that 60 years later, our family would befriend Zofia’s family in California.
When SB and I got off at the Furstenberg train station, we made our way through the quaint streets of this pretty German town towards the camp on the other side of the small lake. It was a bit surreal to walk these streets, to know this town had existed while people suffered so badly not very far away, and later, to be able to see clearly the town’s rooftops and church spires from the concentration camp grounds. After we returned from the camp, we also found out that the station we got off at was the same one that the prisoners stopped at, except they were loaded off the trains at night and forced to march to concentration camp through the nearby woods. As we sat at the train station at the end of our trip, I could not imagine what it felt like to have been them, to get off the train, scared and hungry, and pass that quaint little town on the way to their miserable imprisonment.
The grounds of the camp have been well preserved, and the museums are well done. On our way to the camp we walked passed the guards’ living quarters – about 6 or so German-style two story buildings-- that now function as a hostel. At the camp, the SS headquarters had been turned into a museum, which showed in detail the experiences of 12 women from different countries that had been at Ravensbruck. Some had been imprisoned because they were Jewish or Roma or Sinti, some because they were communists or Jehova’s witnesses, some because they had helped Jews hide or escape, some because they spoke against the Nazi regime, and some because they were resistance fighters, like my grandmother.
The old buildings in which the women lived have all disappeared. There were 30 or so of these “blocks”, and women were crammed three to a wooden plank cot, several cots high, and there was one little heater in the entire building. What remains respectfully preserved however, is the haunting Rollcall area, which I remember my grandmother had described extensively in her diaries. It is a large open area where women were forced to stand at attention at 5 am for several hours, in the rain and snow if that was the time of year, waiting to be counted, while the guards with dogs walked around looking for the sickest and weakest to cull from the crowd. If a prisoner was found to be missing, everyone was forced to stand at rollcall, sometimes for 12 hours at a time, until they were found. Then, the entire block would suffer for it, whether with increased labor or denied rations for the day. One of the war’s most notorious guards, nicknamed “the Stomping Mare”, worked at Ravensbruck as the head guard. She was famous for her vicious punishments and for grabbing children by their hair to throw them onto gas chamber transport trucks; she earned her nickname by finding enjoyment from stomping old women and babies to death with her heavy boots.
After the roll call, the women would set out to their daily jobs, whether it was building roads and ditches or working at the large Siemens factory on site, returning for rollcall in the evening before going back to their blocks late at night for a few hours of sleep.
There was a block for TB patients, who would receive the fewest rations and no medical care, basically being left to die. There was an infirmary, as well, and some of the prisoners who happened to be nursers or doctors would be allowed to work there to help other prisoners. The infirmary however, was also where many women (mostly Jewish and Roma) were sterilized and where the infamous Nazi medical experiments took place. In Ravensbruck, 74 women --all Polish-- were experimented on by Nazi doctors. One of them was my grandmother’s friend Maria Kusmierczak (#7444); she herself had been a doctor before the war started. The experiments involved forcing women to drink infected fluids and then giving them sulfa drugs to test their effects, cutting limbs to cause infecton or doing surgeries without anesthetic,
Next to the living blocks was the prison, from which most women did not return, and next to that, the shooting wall, where earlier in the war (when bullets where plentiful and the camp served primarily as a work camp) women would be executed once their expiration date came up. As one woman described in her memoirs, the prisoners never knew when they would be called up for their death sentence, but every morning after rollcall, some women’s names were read and they would be taken away to be shot. After the war, my grandmother found her file, which stated that she was scheduled for execution in August of 1945, just a few months after she was rescued.
Past the prison was the crematory and the gas chambers. While many of the women were initially either executed at the wall or shipped off to Auschwitz in larger numbers to be killed more systematically (most of the Jewish prisoners were shipped away by 1942), as the war progressed, the camp began to serve more and more as a death camp. The gas chamber was built for the sick, old and weak, and by 1943 the crematorium began to run day and night. Women living at the camp described the ashes falling into their hair and clothes and the pervasive smell of burnt flesh. It was the job of the Jehova’s Witness prisoners to dump the ashes from the crematorium into the small scenic lake the separated the camp from the town of Furstenberg. Eventually, when the camp was full and more prisoners arrived, they were just forced to live in tents until they died. When Auschwitz was about to be liberated by the Allies, prisoners from there were sent to Ravensbruck, and then, once the crematorium was overwhelmed, bodies were buried in large pits in the forest next to the camp. In an increasing zeal to kill as many people as possible before the liberation of Ravensbruck, thousands were forced on a death march as the Allies approached the town of Furstenberg.
One of the most interesting things I learned about the camp, however, was not all the tragedy that was there, but the amazing bravery and solidarity that the women who lived and died there displayed. I remember that my grandmother had talked about the secret drawings women made to document what they saw, many of which can be seen at the museum now, and of the little dolls they made from rags for the children in the camp. Women who worked in administration constantly fudged numbers and statistics to move the sickest women to easier jobs or to switch the numbers of women who were sentenced for death with the numbers of those who had already died, so they could become anonymous. Women who worked in the infirmary would change the vitals of the sick, so that they would not be sent off to the gas chambers if they looked like they weren’t going to survive, and those who lived in the blocks would donate some of their meager rations to the women who were transported to the tents, given no food and left to die. Those who worked in the Siemens factory or the ammunitions factory would sabotage the radios and bombs they built, so as not to contribute to the war effort, and the women who worked in administrative jobs would fudge the productivity numbers so that weaker women would not be culled from their jobs if they were working too slowly. As prisoner Friedl Burda, who was forced to work in the ammunitions factory, wrote about her sabotage work: “…Afraid? Look, we were perfectly aware that we were risking our lives. But making the effort made it worthwhile. I told myself – rather my life for a good cause than for a bad one. The sabotaging, that was where I can definitely say: I made the war a little shorter.”
Visiting Ravensbruck was obviously an intense experience, but a worthwhile one. I’m not sure I could ever visit a concentration camp again, but I think that every person should see one in his or her lifetime. The level of evil that “civilized” people are capable of is appalling, but the courage of those who are confronted by it at least gives you something good to focus your mind on.
Ravensbruck concentration camp was primarily a women’s concentration camp that opened in Germany in 1939. Among the 130,000 women, children and men who were held there, was my grandmother, her three friends, and, as we recently found out, the aunt of our Polish friends in the USA. While it was functioning, the camp held Jewish and Roma/Sinti women (most of whom were shipped off to Auschwitz in 1942) and political prisoners from all over Europe. The camp functioned primarily as a work camp, where the prisoners were forced to work from early morning to night on meager rations and allowed to die of starvation or illness if they were not hardy enough. Over time, however, the camp also built a gas chamber, to which the sickest prisoners were sent.
My grandmother survived, as did the three women she met there who became her lifelong friends. Our friends’ aunt did not, and I found her name in a book honoring all prisoners who had died there. We had met our Polish friends in California many years after moving there from Poland, yet strangely, as my mom and I researched this trip to Ravensbruck, we found out that their aunt, Zofia Gapinska, had shared the same transport train to Ravensbruck that my grandmother had been on. Zofia’s number was 11235, my grandmother’s 11314, her friend Janina’s was 11310 and Maria’s was 7888. Maria’s number is lower because she arrived in 1941. My grandmother, Janina, and Zofia all arrived on May 31, 1942 on the Lublin-Warszawa transport. Zofia died sometime in the Winter of 1944 or 45, but the records aren’t clear since the Germans destroyed many records before the war ended. My grandmother and her friends -- all sick and near starvation -- were liberated by the allies in April of 1945. It is strange to think that Zofia must have known them, and that 60 years later, our family would befriend Zofia’s family in California.
When SB and I got off at the Furstenberg train station, we made our way through the quaint streets of this pretty German town towards the camp on the other side of the small lake. It was a bit surreal to walk these streets, to know this town had existed while people suffered so badly not very far away, and later, to be able to see clearly the town’s rooftops and church spires from the concentration camp grounds. After we returned from the camp, we also found out that the station we got off at was the same one that the prisoners stopped at, except they were loaded off the trains at night and forced to march to concentration camp through the nearby woods. As we sat at the train station at the end of our trip, I could not imagine what it felt like to have been them, to get off the train, scared and hungry, and pass that quaint little town on the way to their miserable imprisonment.
The grounds of the camp have been well preserved, and the museums are well done. On our way to the camp we walked passed the guards’ living quarters – about 6 or so German-style two story buildings-- that now function as a hostel. At the camp, the SS headquarters had been turned into a museum, which showed in detail the experiences of 12 women from different countries that had been at Ravensbruck. Some had been imprisoned because they were Jewish or Roma or Sinti, some because they were communists or Jehova’s witnesses, some because they had helped Jews hide or escape, some because they spoke against the Nazi regime, and some because they were resistance fighters, like my grandmother.
The old buildings in which the women lived have all disappeared. There were 30 or so of these “blocks”, and women were crammed three to a wooden plank cot, several cots high, and there was one little heater in the entire building. What remains respectfully preserved however, is the haunting Rollcall area, which I remember my grandmother had described extensively in her diaries. It is a large open area where women were forced to stand at attention at 5 am for several hours, in the rain and snow if that was the time of year, waiting to be counted, while the guards with dogs walked around looking for the sickest and weakest to cull from the crowd. If a prisoner was found to be missing, everyone was forced to stand at rollcall, sometimes for 12 hours at a time, until they were found. Then, the entire block would suffer for it, whether with increased labor or denied rations for the day. One of the war’s most notorious guards, nicknamed “the Stomping Mare”, worked at Ravensbruck as the head guard. She was famous for her vicious punishments and for grabbing children by their hair to throw them onto gas chamber transport trucks; she earned her nickname by finding enjoyment from stomping old women and babies to death with her heavy boots.
After the roll call, the women would set out to their daily jobs, whether it was building roads and ditches or working at the large Siemens factory on site, returning for rollcall in the evening before going back to their blocks late at night for a few hours of sleep.
There was a block for TB patients, who would receive the fewest rations and no medical care, basically being left to die. There was an infirmary, as well, and some of the prisoners who happened to be nursers or doctors would be allowed to work there to help other prisoners. The infirmary however, was also where many women (mostly Jewish and Roma) were sterilized and where the infamous Nazi medical experiments took place. In Ravensbruck, 74 women --all Polish-- were experimented on by Nazi doctors. One of them was my grandmother’s friend Maria Kusmierczak (#7444); she herself had been a doctor before the war started. The experiments involved forcing women to drink infected fluids and then giving them sulfa drugs to test their effects, cutting limbs to cause infecton or doing surgeries without anesthetic,
Next to the living blocks was the prison, from which most women did not return, and next to that, the shooting wall, where earlier in the war (when bullets where plentiful and the camp served primarily as a work camp) women would be executed once their expiration date came up. As one woman described in her memoirs, the prisoners never knew when they would be called up for their death sentence, but every morning after rollcall, some women’s names were read and they would be taken away to be shot. After the war, my grandmother found her file, which stated that she was scheduled for execution in August of 1945, just a few months after she was rescued.
Past the prison was the crematory and the gas chambers. While many of the women were initially either executed at the wall or shipped off to Auschwitz in larger numbers to be killed more systematically (most of the Jewish prisoners were shipped away by 1942), as the war progressed, the camp began to serve more and more as a death camp. The gas chamber was built for the sick, old and weak, and by 1943 the crematorium began to run day and night. Women living at the camp described the ashes falling into their hair and clothes and the pervasive smell of burnt flesh. It was the job of the Jehova’s Witness prisoners to dump the ashes from the crematorium into the small scenic lake the separated the camp from the town of Furstenberg. Eventually, when the camp was full and more prisoners arrived, they were just forced to live in tents until they died. When Auschwitz was about to be liberated by the Allies, prisoners from there were sent to Ravensbruck, and then, once the crematorium was overwhelmed, bodies were buried in large pits in the forest next to the camp. In an increasing zeal to kill as many people as possible before the liberation of Ravensbruck, thousands were forced on a death march as the Allies approached the town of Furstenberg.
One of the most interesting things I learned about the camp, however, was not all the tragedy that was there, but the amazing bravery and solidarity that the women who lived and died there displayed. I remember that my grandmother had talked about the secret drawings women made to document what they saw, many of which can be seen at the museum now, and of the little dolls they made from rags for the children in the camp. Women who worked in administration constantly fudged numbers and statistics to move the sickest women to easier jobs or to switch the numbers of women who were sentenced for death with the numbers of those who had already died, so they could become anonymous. Women who worked in the infirmary would change the vitals of the sick, so that they would not be sent off to the gas chambers if they looked like they weren’t going to survive, and those who lived in the blocks would donate some of their meager rations to the women who were transported to the tents, given no food and left to die. Those who worked in the Siemens factory or the ammunitions factory would sabotage the radios and bombs they built, so as not to contribute to the war effort, and the women who worked in administrative jobs would fudge the productivity numbers so that weaker women would not be culled from their jobs if they were working too slowly. As prisoner Friedl Burda, who was forced to work in the ammunitions factory, wrote about her sabotage work: “…Afraid? Look, we were perfectly aware that we were risking our lives. But making the effort made it worthwhile. I told myself – rather my life for a good cause than for a bad one. The sabotaging, that was where I can definitely say: I made the war a little shorter.”
Visiting Ravensbruck was obviously an intense experience, but a worthwhile one. I’m not sure I could ever visit a concentration camp again, but I think that every person should see one in his or her lifetime. The level of evil that “civilized” people are capable of is appalling, but the courage of those who are confronted by it at least gives you something good to focus your mind on.
Poland - last few days
I spent my last few days in Poland getting to enjoy a bit of the Polish spring and trying to get sick of Polish food (which I never did). SB arrived on Sunday and, together with my cousin Alek and friend Vera, we rode our bikes around Gdansk, touring the old city through narrow alleyways and cobblestone streets, and stopping for beer and dinner (Hawaiian pizza!) once we got tired.
The next day, SB, my cousin Marcin, his friend Mateusz, and I all loaded our bikes onto the train and headed for the seaside town of Puck. From there, we rode nearly 30 km along a bike trail up the narrow Hel peninsula, finally stopping at the town of Jastarnia. Along the way, we had the bay of Gdansk to our right and the Baltic ocean to the left, separated by a quarter mile of woods and an occasional small campground. The weather was warm, the beaches we stopped at had beautiful clean white sand (that squeaked as you walked in it), but the water was bit chilly. We had fresh fried fish in Chalupas (literally translates as ‘old huts’) and then more yummy ice cream (and more lazing on the beach) when we reached our destination of Jastarnia.
That night, SB and I moved back my mom’s cousin’s house in Wielki Kack, where we proceeded to consume vast amounts of delicious food for the next two days. (At one point, SB truly impressed my aunt and uncle by eating one fried chicken breast, two large pork cutlets, a massive pile of potatoes and salad. I came in close behind, quite aware that our trip to India was nearing.) Our last day in Poland was supposed to be spent in my hometown of Gdynia, walking on the boulevard on the beach and shopping at the massive old flea market, but instead, we returned to Gdansk to hunt down my digital camera which I had left at a restaurant. We ate more ice cream and saw more amber jewelry than one could believe existed on the entire earth, and after another massive meal at my aunt’s house, we left on the overnight train to Berlin (with sandwiches and extra pork cutlets for our ride).
The next day, SB, my cousin Marcin, his friend Mateusz, and I all loaded our bikes onto the train and headed for the seaside town of Puck. From there, we rode nearly 30 km along a bike trail up the narrow Hel peninsula, finally stopping at the town of Jastarnia. Along the way, we had the bay of Gdansk to our right and the Baltic ocean to the left, separated by a quarter mile of woods and an occasional small campground. The weather was warm, the beaches we stopped at had beautiful clean white sand (that squeaked as you walked in it), but the water was bit chilly. We had fresh fried fish in Chalupas (literally translates as ‘old huts’) and then more yummy ice cream (and more lazing on the beach) when we reached our destination of Jastarnia.
That night, SB and I moved back my mom’s cousin’s house in Wielki Kack, where we proceeded to consume vast amounts of delicious food for the next two days. (At one point, SB truly impressed my aunt and uncle by eating one fried chicken breast, two large pork cutlets, a massive pile of potatoes and salad. I came in close behind, quite aware that our trip to India was nearing.) Our last day in Poland was supposed to be spent in my hometown of Gdynia, walking on the boulevard on the beach and shopping at the massive old flea market, but instead, we returned to Gdansk to hunt down my digital camera which I had left at a restaurant. We ate more ice cream and saw more amber jewelry than one could believe existed on the entire earth, and after another massive meal at my aunt’s house, we left on the overnight train to Berlin (with sandwiches and extra pork cutlets for our ride).
Monday, May 05, 2008
hello from india!
We've arrived in India. We're in a small health care complex on the outskirts of the little village of Ghanpur, about 50 km from Hyderabad. It's pretty awesome. We have limited access to internet (and no access to phones!) so no news is good news for all you out there. However, I've managed to write a blog entry or two on SB's computer and will post them soon (including catch up from Poland, Ravensbruck and Berlin). Best, hibiscusfire
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
In Poland...
It's been a while since I've had a chance to blog. I arrived in Gdansk, Poland last Sunday (13th) and things have been rather "non-stop" (a popular English saying in Poland and Hungary these days) since then.
My trip to England was great. After the first few hours on English soil of tango lessons in a old English manor, I spent the next day walking around Norwich and ducking into buildings in between brief hailstorms. We spent the evening at the local pub, playing the British version of billiars (yellow and red balls, smaller cue ball), and drinking some good English brews. The next day, we drove all the way to the sea (about 15 minutes) and ate left over wedding cake (my friend is a wedding cake maker, and she had some yummy cake leftover) and drank good English tea from the thermos, while watching seals sleep on the beach in the sun. The day ended with another evening at the pub and billiards, and then I took the late bus to Stansted airport.
On my midnight coach ride to Stansted airport, the bald-headed bus driver in a dark, mortician like suit introduced himself in the following way: Good evening ladies and gentlemen. The lou is a bit fresh, but I've used it and am still walking. Seatbelts should be worn at all times, by law, though I'd like to see you use the lou with your seatbelt on. Anyone like to play with fire? There's an extinguisher here to the right. How about Drs and Nurses? First aid kit to the right, as well, use the fire extinguisher to break the glass. There's no valium in there, but you will find bandages and maybe a scalpel. For those who'd like to nap, make sure to wake up for your stop. "
I made a comfy bed for myself under a flight announcements sign, but did not fall asleep for two hours, because I was determined to finish my latest book. I woke up at 5am, surrounded by passengers waiting to check in for their flight.
Playing pool in Norwich
At the seaside
After less than 2 hours of sleep, I arrived in Gdansk, Poland, and began my whirlwind day of visiting family. My sister had flown in the night before, and we met up with uncles and aunts, and consumed multiple cakes, cookies and sweets as well as innumerable number of cups of coffee and tea, before meeting up with our remaining family over dinner at a restaurant that overlooked the Gdynia beach.
In Sopot
We spent the next three days with my aunt in Chojnice, going down to the basement every two hours to feed the wood burning stove that heats the house and hot water and playing Gin Rummy and Kierki late into the night. My aunt lives in the house I spent every summer and holiday in when I was a kid and not much has changed there, which is great for nostalgia. The basement cellar still has dozens of the jams and fruit compotes that my grandmother had made over the years from the fruits in her garden, and we had one or two each night. We had raspberry jam, and gooseberry, cherry, and black currant compotes, and all were delicious.
On Thursday morning, we left for Warsaw. I always feel sad leaving Chojnice, a place that seems frozen in the time of my early childhood, and where not everything is going well and my aunt lives by herself in a big empty house. This Friday, when I have a bit of time, I will go back for one more visit.
In Warsaw, my sister and I met with my mother's godmother, who lives in the center of Warsaw overlooking a monument to the heros of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. There, we caught up, told stories, and drank maybe 6 cups of tea (with cakes and cookies of course). The next day my sister left for the airport at 5:30 am, only to have her flight leave too late to catch her connection in Paris. The poor girl had to stay in the French capital for a full day and night, with free food and lodging.
I spent the weekend with my godson's family, a very active group of people that used to run marathons in their spare time. They have a pool table in their living room and a small climbing wall in their yard, so I was pretty much in heaven. We played pool into the night, woke up at 7am and went on a 10 km fast paced hike in the woods (in the rain), followed by a cup of tea (at McDonalds!), and three hours at the local climbing wall gym, all before more pool late into the night. The next morning, I had a train to catch at 7am and my godson's sister Marta (who has been a 1st place Judo champion in Europe and the US in the past and Poland this year and who walks around the house on her hands in her spare time) headed off for another competition. (In this entire trip, I missed my godson, who was off at a camp in Germany with his Judo team.)
I took a walk through Old Town in Warsaw...
...and the nearby park.
Sore from my rock climbing day (we climbed and downclimbed each climb), I rested durin a five hour train ride from Warsaw to Gdynia, where my cousin Alek picked me up. After dropping off my 15 kilo (I made the weight limit!) backpack at Alek's house in Rumia, we went to walk through my old haunting grounds of Gdynia. These included the "molo", which is the oceann-side boulevard next to the beach which winds its way to a small hillside park, followed by the Mariola dessert cafe at the top of the hill (two scoops of smietankowe ice cream- no english version of this flavor exists - plus one scoop of strawberry, topped with fresh whipped cream and fruits.)
We made it home in time for Alek's mom, Ella to arrive from work, which meant that we were off again soon after swallowing the last bit of dinner. (Ella has taken the term "Carpe diem" closely to heart.) Within a few minutes, we had borrowed a bike from a neighbor and were riding along a 25 km bike trail that wound through salt-water estuaries towards the ocean. At the end of our path, we stopped in a small sea-side town where we each had a pint of beer on a park bench overlooking the sea. Since it happened to be my 'name day' that day, we ended the evening late into the night with a few glasses of wine and long debates about religion and politics (which were especially funny given my inability to understand or use the more complex vocabulary of the Polish language.)
Ella at the beginning of our bike trip (right before my camera battery died, so no pictures, sorry...)
In Gdynia on the molo
I am now staying with the family of my mom's cousin in Wielki Kack, where three generations live within 30 meteres of each other. They recently finished building two huge gorgeous houses for themselves and their kids, and are finally getting a chance to slow down and enjoy them. We eat a lot of food here, which I am trying to store in my belly for our trip to India, where at this point, I really won't need to risk my health by eating. Breakfast usually consists of several eggs, bacon or ham, many pieces of bread and is quickly followed by coffee and cookies. I can barely move. Yesterday, my cousin Sebastian and I went to Gdynia again, and visited my old school and building on 10 lutego street, before stopping for (you guessed it) ice cream again. Tonight, I'll be heading off to Gdansk to meet up with my cousins Olenka and Marzenka to go rock climbing, but I fear that I might injure myself trying to pull my ass up the rocks...
Roxanna, the youngest member of our family in Wielki Kack, joyful as usual.
My trip to England was great. After the first few hours on English soil of tango lessons in a old English manor, I spent the next day walking around Norwich and ducking into buildings in between brief hailstorms. We spent the evening at the local pub, playing the British version of billiars (yellow and red balls, smaller cue ball), and drinking some good English brews. The next day, we drove all the way to the sea (about 15 minutes) and ate left over wedding cake (my friend is a wedding cake maker, and she had some yummy cake leftover) and drank good English tea from the thermos, while watching seals sleep on the beach in the sun. The day ended with another evening at the pub and billiards, and then I took the late bus to Stansted airport.
On my midnight coach ride to Stansted airport, the bald-headed bus driver in a dark, mortician like suit introduced himself in the following way: Good evening ladies and gentlemen. The lou is a bit fresh, but I've used it and am still walking. Seatbelts should be worn at all times, by law, though I'd like to see you use the lou with your seatbelt on. Anyone like to play with fire? There's an extinguisher here to the right. How about Drs and Nurses? First aid kit to the right, as well, use the fire extinguisher to break the glass. There's no valium in there, but you will find bandages and maybe a scalpel. For those who'd like to nap, make sure to wake up for your stop. "
I made a comfy bed for myself under a flight announcements sign, but did not fall asleep for two hours, because I was determined to finish my latest book. I woke up at 5am, surrounded by passengers waiting to check in for their flight.
Playing pool in Norwich
At the seaside
After less than 2 hours of sleep, I arrived in Gdansk, Poland, and began my whirlwind day of visiting family. My sister had flown in the night before, and we met up with uncles and aunts, and consumed multiple cakes, cookies and sweets as well as innumerable number of cups of coffee and tea, before meeting up with our remaining family over dinner at a restaurant that overlooked the Gdynia beach.
In Sopot
We spent the next three days with my aunt in Chojnice, going down to the basement every two hours to feed the wood burning stove that heats the house and hot water and playing Gin Rummy and Kierki late into the night. My aunt lives in the house I spent every summer and holiday in when I was a kid and not much has changed there, which is great for nostalgia. The basement cellar still has dozens of the jams and fruit compotes that my grandmother had made over the years from the fruits in her garden, and we had one or two each night. We had raspberry jam, and gooseberry, cherry, and black currant compotes, and all were delicious.
On Thursday morning, we left for Warsaw. I always feel sad leaving Chojnice, a place that seems frozen in the time of my early childhood, and where not everything is going well and my aunt lives by herself in a big empty house. This Friday, when I have a bit of time, I will go back for one more visit.
In Warsaw, my sister and I met with my mother's godmother, who lives in the center of Warsaw overlooking a monument to the heros of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. There, we caught up, told stories, and drank maybe 6 cups of tea (with cakes and cookies of course). The next day my sister left for the airport at 5:30 am, only to have her flight leave too late to catch her connection in Paris. The poor girl had to stay in the French capital for a full day and night, with free food and lodging.
I spent the weekend with my godson's family, a very active group of people that used to run marathons in their spare time. They have a pool table in their living room and a small climbing wall in their yard, so I was pretty much in heaven. We played pool into the night, woke up at 7am and went on a 10 km fast paced hike in the woods (in the rain), followed by a cup of tea (at McDonalds!), and three hours at the local climbing wall gym, all before more pool late into the night. The next morning, I had a train to catch at 7am and my godson's sister Marta (who has been a 1st place Judo champion in Europe and the US in the past and Poland this year and who walks around the house on her hands in her spare time) headed off for another competition. (In this entire trip, I missed my godson, who was off at a camp in Germany with his Judo team.)
I took a walk through Old Town in Warsaw...
...and the nearby park.
Sore from my rock climbing day (we climbed and downclimbed each climb), I rested durin a five hour train ride from Warsaw to Gdynia, where my cousin Alek picked me up. After dropping off my 15 kilo (I made the weight limit!) backpack at Alek's house in Rumia, we went to walk through my old haunting grounds of Gdynia. These included the "molo", which is the oceann-side boulevard next to the beach which winds its way to a small hillside park, followed by the Mariola dessert cafe at the top of the hill (two scoops of smietankowe ice cream- no english version of this flavor exists - plus one scoop of strawberry, topped with fresh whipped cream and fruits.)
We made it home in time for Alek's mom, Ella to arrive from work, which meant that we were off again soon after swallowing the last bit of dinner. (Ella has taken the term "Carpe diem" closely to heart.) Within a few minutes, we had borrowed a bike from a neighbor and were riding along a 25 km bike trail that wound through salt-water estuaries towards the ocean. At the end of our path, we stopped in a small sea-side town where we each had a pint of beer on a park bench overlooking the sea. Since it happened to be my 'name day' that day, we ended the evening late into the night with a few glasses of wine and long debates about religion and politics (which were especially funny given my inability to understand or use the more complex vocabulary of the Polish language.)
Ella at the beginning of our bike trip (right before my camera battery died, so no pictures, sorry...)
In Gdynia on the molo
I am now staying with the family of my mom's cousin in Wielki Kack, where three generations live within 30 meteres of each other. They recently finished building two huge gorgeous houses for themselves and their kids, and are finally getting a chance to slow down and enjoy them. We eat a lot of food here, which I am trying to store in my belly for our trip to India, where at this point, I really won't need to risk my health by eating. Breakfast usually consists of several eggs, bacon or ham, many pieces of bread and is quickly followed by coffee and cookies. I can barely move. Yesterday, my cousin Sebastian and I went to Gdynia again, and visited my old school and building on 10 lutego street, before stopping for (you guessed it) ice cream again. Tonight, I'll be heading off to Gdansk to meet up with my cousins Olenka and Marzenka to go rock climbing, but I fear that I might injure myself trying to pull my ass up the rocks...
Roxanna, the youngest member of our family in Wielki Kack, joyful as usual.
Saturday, April 12, 2008
Last days in Hungary
Since I didn't get a chance to write about our last days in Hungary, here is a a bit of a summary (which I'm writing while my friend, the cake maker/tango teacher, plays Mozart on the piano as we wait for the bride and groom to come pick up the cake):
On Monday and Tuesday, we went on our countryside trip. It almost didn't happen. We woke in the morning to news of a strike - of all public transport in Budapest and the rail lines. It was unbelievable, the Hungarians said, to have both systems go into strike at once, but after all the unfortunate travel mojo SP has experience, the three of us weren't surprised.
We ended up driving to Pesc. Andras, our awesome university travel guide, borrowed a car from his father, and we were off. During our three hour journey, we saw traveled more than halfway across the country, even stopping by Andras' family's cute lake house on the Balaton, so we could dip our fingers into the chilly waters and say we've been there.
Pesc is a charming old town that dates back to the 4th century. We stayed at a small boarding house tucked into the back courtyard of one of the squares in old town. It was a great location: we were seconds from the winding streets of Old Town, the beautiful old buildings, churches and mosques, teh pastry shops and ice cream stands, and the little bar twenty feet from our door, which had a pinball machine we had a hard time pulling SB away from. (I know that at least one of you who is reading this would be interested to know that it was a Star Trek the Next Generation pinball game.)
Our dinner in Pesc was at another hidden basement restaurant (I've come to believe that these are the best places to find food in Hungary). I had the local beer and deer with wild forest berries and potato croquettes, and I pretty much licked my plate clean. We had ice cream cones on the way to dinner and tort on our way back.
After a morning breakfast at the nearby pastry shop, we drove south from Pesc to the little town of Szigetvar, only miles away from the Croatian border. There, we visited the county hospital, which has a 50 bed inpatient alcohol rehab facility and also provides outpatient counseling services. All this is done by a staff of two psychiatrists and a couple of psychologists, as well as four rehabilitated former alcohol dependent patients who are training to be counselors. The staff all took time out of their busy day to talk with us and answer our questions, and we were all very impressed with the work they did.
After lunch at the hospital cafeteria, we headed to the castle of Szigetvar for a walk and some Hungarian history. We walked the pretty grounds of the old area (the castle is just ruins at this point) and toured the museum where we learned about the 6th century battle against the Turks, which the Hungarians lost. There were several forted areas in Szigetvar in the 5th and 6th century, all surrounded by a large moat (pretty much like islands in a dammed lake). The turks tried several times to invade, unsuccessfully, then, they drained the moat, stormed down the walls, killed pretty much everyone around and ruled the area for the next few centuries. The museum had weapons and drawings from the era, and you could almost feel the ghosts of the people who walked the ground below more than a thousand years ago.
We returned to Budapest in time for the opera. It was a beautiful classical production of La Boheme in the gorgeous Budapest Opera House, with a captivating set (quite scenes of Paris at night: dark homes with candle lite glowing out of windows, snow falling in the park). We had paid $7 for the nose bleed tickets, which required that we use the side door, not the main entrance, as we soon found out. But our view was amazing, the sound was beautiful, and the set seemed designed for our noseblled perspective. The three of us universally loved it.
SB, me, SP looking pretty at the opera.
Our last day in Budapest was quite full. After another long breakfast at the hotel, we walked downtown for email and (our now daily) two scoops of ice cream and then toured the "Terror Museum".
The Terror Museum is a fascinating place. It is located at 60 Andrassy St, in the exact same building that served as the secret police headquarters during the Communist era. It documents, quite powerfully, the oppressive acts of the secret police - under the arm of the Soviet Union - especially in the 50s and 60s. One moves from room to room, learning about the history of the Soviet presence in Hungary, about the oppression of the Stalin era, of the indoctrination of children (to, for instance, turn their parents in for 'acts against the state'), of the restriction of free speech and the attempt to even restrict free thought with widespread and blatant use of arrests and torture. The last part of the museum is the basement, which can only be accessed through a slow, dark, elevator ride down from the second floor (while watching a movie of a man describing the methodical torture and executions he witnessed while working as a janitor in the building.) In the basement, which is deep in the ground and soundproof, are the reconstructed cells that used to house political prisoners: one filled with six inches of dirty cold water, in which the prisoner was forced to sit, sometimes for days; another only 4 feet tall, so that the prisoner could never straighten out his body; a few holding cells, now dry and clean, that in photos from the past was were filled with grime, water, blood stains; a gallows where the prisoners were hung; and throughout it all, photos of the people who were tortured there.
We emerged from the museum a bit overwhelmed an exhausted, but managed to recover over tea, coffee and luscious dessert (I had crepes with ricotta and fresh apricot, floating in vanilla custard) at a cafe bar not further than a block away. It was a bit of a surreal contrast, though maybe not as much as it would have been to have been in the same location some 40 years ago, walking home from work, while someone's tortured agony was being lost into the cement below your feet.
I took a walk after our dessert, a 2 hour hike up to the Citadel on a tall hill in the middle of the city, with amazing 360 degree views of Budapest and the surrounding lands. On top is a 14 meter Liberation Monument of a woman, her dress flowing in the wind, holding a palm leaf in victory. I took some photos I might post later, but here's a great link to someone else's nice shoots (he had smartly bothered to bring his wide angle lens with him).
Our night ended with a farewell dinner at another great Budapest restaurant, with Andras and Gyula, our wonderful Semmelweis University hosts. Of course, we had dessert, again, this time crepes filled with chocolate ricotta and doused in chocolate sauce.
On Monday and Tuesday, we went on our countryside trip. It almost didn't happen. We woke in the morning to news of a strike - of all public transport in Budapest and the rail lines. It was unbelievable, the Hungarians said, to have both systems go into strike at once, but after all the unfortunate travel mojo SP has experience, the three of us weren't surprised.
We ended up driving to Pesc. Andras, our awesome university travel guide, borrowed a car from his father, and we were off. During our three hour journey, we saw traveled more than halfway across the country, even stopping by Andras' family's cute lake house on the Balaton, so we could dip our fingers into the chilly waters and say we've been there.
Pesc is a charming old town that dates back to the 4th century. We stayed at a small boarding house tucked into the back courtyard of one of the squares in old town. It was a great location: we were seconds from the winding streets of Old Town, the beautiful old buildings, churches and mosques, teh pastry shops and ice cream stands, and the little bar twenty feet from our door, which had a pinball machine we had a hard time pulling SB away from. (I know that at least one of you who is reading this would be interested to know that it was a Star Trek the Next Generation pinball game.)
Our dinner in Pesc was at another hidden basement restaurant (I've come to believe that these are the best places to find food in Hungary). I had the local beer and deer with wild forest berries and potato croquettes, and I pretty much licked my plate clean. We had ice cream cones on the way to dinner and tort on our way back.
After a morning breakfast at the nearby pastry shop, we drove south from Pesc to the little town of Szigetvar, only miles away from the Croatian border. There, we visited the county hospital, which has a 50 bed inpatient alcohol rehab facility and also provides outpatient counseling services. All this is done by a staff of two psychiatrists and a couple of psychologists, as well as four rehabilitated former alcohol dependent patients who are training to be counselors. The staff all took time out of their busy day to talk with us and answer our questions, and we were all very impressed with the work they did.
After lunch at the hospital cafeteria, we headed to the castle of Szigetvar for a walk and some Hungarian history. We walked the pretty grounds of the old area (the castle is just ruins at this point) and toured the museum where we learned about the 6th century battle against the Turks, which the Hungarians lost. There were several forted areas in Szigetvar in the 5th and 6th century, all surrounded by a large moat (pretty much like islands in a dammed lake). The turks tried several times to invade, unsuccessfully, then, they drained the moat, stormed down the walls, killed pretty much everyone around and ruled the area for the next few centuries. The museum had weapons and drawings from the era, and you could almost feel the ghosts of the people who walked the ground below more than a thousand years ago.
We returned to Budapest in time for the opera. It was a beautiful classical production of La Boheme in the gorgeous Budapest Opera House, with a captivating set (quite scenes of Paris at night: dark homes with candle lite glowing out of windows, snow falling in the park). We had paid $7 for the nose bleed tickets, which required that we use the side door, not the main entrance, as we soon found out. But our view was amazing, the sound was beautiful, and the set seemed designed for our noseblled perspective. The three of us universally loved it.
SB, me, SP looking pretty at the opera.
Our last day in Budapest was quite full. After another long breakfast at the hotel, we walked downtown for email and (our now daily) two scoops of ice cream and then toured the "Terror Museum".
The Terror Museum is a fascinating place. It is located at 60 Andrassy St, in the exact same building that served as the secret police headquarters during the Communist era. It documents, quite powerfully, the oppressive acts of the secret police - under the arm of the Soviet Union - especially in the 50s and 60s. One moves from room to room, learning about the history of the Soviet presence in Hungary, about the oppression of the Stalin era, of the indoctrination of children (to, for instance, turn their parents in for 'acts against the state'), of the restriction of free speech and the attempt to even restrict free thought with widespread and blatant use of arrests and torture. The last part of the museum is the basement, which can only be accessed through a slow, dark, elevator ride down from the second floor (while watching a movie of a man describing the methodical torture and executions he witnessed while working as a janitor in the building.) In the basement, which is deep in the ground and soundproof, are the reconstructed cells that used to house political prisoners: one filled with six inches of dirty cold water, in which the prisoner was forced to sit, sometimes for days; another only 4 feet tall, so that the prisoner could never straighten out his body; a few holding cells, now dry and clean, that in photos from the past was were filled with grime, water, blood stains; a gallows where the prisoners were hung; and throughout it all, photos of the people who were tortured there.
We emerged from the museum a bit overwhelmed an exhausted, but managed to recover over tea, coffee and luscious dessert (I had crepes with ricotta and fresh apricot, floating in vanilla custard) at a cafe bar not further than a block away. It was a bit of a surreal contrast, though maybe not as much as it would have been to have been in the same location some 40 years ago, walking home from work, while someone's tortured agony was being lost into the cement below your feet.
I took a walk after our dessert, a 2 hour hike up to the Citadel on a tall hill in the middle of the city, with amazing 360 degree views of Budapest and the surrounding lands. On top is a 14 meter Liberation Monument of a woman, her dress flowing in the wind, holding a palm leaf in victory. I took some photos I might post later, but here's a great link to someone else's nice shoots (he had smartly bothered to bring his wide angle lens with him).
Our night ended with a farewell dinner at another great Budapest restaurant, with Andras and Gyula, our wonderful Semmelweis University hosts. Of course, we had dessert, again, this time crepes filled with chocolate ricotta and doused in chocolate sauce.
Friday, April 11, 2008
Hello from England!
Our two weeks in Budapest have ended. I have a lot of adventures and memories to record from the last few days and that entry will happen soon...but first, just an update on now:
SB and I landed flew to London yesterday, while SP headed off to Italy (yes, she's the smart one who thought to take weather into consideration). After landing at the brand new Terminal 5 in Heathrow (that nearly didn't open days before the flight), we made our way through the tube ("mind the gap") to King's Cross station where SB headed off to her hostel and I continued on to Liverpool St, to catch my train to Norwich.
Why Norwich? Why not? I have two friends in England, and one of them is currently in South America. My other friend, who I met at BM last year (!), lives in Norwich and teaching tango and designs wedding cakes for a living. What better way to see the real England!
What did I do on my first night in Norwich? Guess.
If you guessed that I went to a small tango dance class at an old countryside English mansion (Bylaugh Hall, Norfolk - google it!), you obviously don't know me very well, but you'd be right! My friend whisked me from the train station, had be dig my nice low-healed strap sandles out of my backpack (now I know why I brought them) and we dashed to the countryside. We dined on some old fashioned British country food (mixed crumble with fresh cream for dessert), and then went off to a beautiful ballroom for the dance lessons. There were about 8 of us - mostly men and women in their 40s-50s - and everyone was from the surrounding area. My friend was the one, the owner of the masion was the other, and all the other students helped me get the basics (because my dancing capabilities are remarkably limited.) I was terrible, but people were very patient with me and it was a blast.
This morning, I'm wandering around Norwich, a pretty town, with a remarkable number of churches. Lots of good tea, though I do miss those Hungarian desserts...
SB and I landed flew to London yesterday, while SP headed off to Italy (yes, she's the smart one who thought to take weather into consideration). After landing at the brand new Terminal 5 in Heathrow (that nearly didn't open days before the flight), we made our way through the tube ("mind the gap") to King's Cross station where SB headed off to her hostel and I continued on to Liverpool St, to catch my train to Norwich.
Why Norwich? Why not? I have two friends in England, and one of them is currently in South America. My other friend, who I met at BM last year (!), lives in Norwich and teaching tango and designs wedding cakes for a living. What better way to see the real England!
What did I do on my first night in Norwich? Guess.
If you guessed that I went to a small tango dance class at an old countryside English mansion (Bylaugh Hall, Norfolk - google it!), you obviously don't know me very well, but you'd be right! My friend whisked me from the train station, had be dig my nice low-healed strap sandles out of my backpack (now I know why I brought them) and we dashed to the countryside. We dined on some old fashioned British country food (mixed crumble with fresh cream for dessert), and then went off to a beautiful ballroom for the dance lessons. There were about 8 of us - mostly men and women in their 40s-50s - and everyone was from the surrounding area. My friend was the one, the owner of the masion was the other, and all the other students helped me get the basics (because my dancing capabilities are remarkably limited.) I was terrible, but people were very patient with me and it was a blast.
This morning, I'm wandering around Norwich, a pretty town, with a remarkable number of churches. Lots of good tea, though I do miss those Hungarian desserts...
Sunday, April 06, 2008
Weekend touring
Well, not so much to say today. The three of us spent yesterday walking around Buda Castle and Old Town. Great views of Budapest (though it was overcast and I couldn't help thinking that "next time" I'll return at dawn or dusk.) Many interesting statues, cobblestone roads, churches, tourists, and locals selling their wares. We spent the evening in a great little find of a restaurant/bar, near Liszt square. It was in the basement of the building, with wooden panelling thoughout, old books on shelves, couches, chairs and booths. I had a delicious dinner of chicken stewed with apples and a not-to-sweet honey sauce and -of course- deep fried potatoe balls and wine. It was yummy. We got to our hotel, shamefully, before nine but stayed up talking for a while, trying to figure out just how we were going to survive our two weeks in India during its most humid and hot months.
This morning, after another slow breakfast (this really is vacation), we went to Margaret Island, a large park in between Buda and Pest. We walked the length of the park and back, though large fields, past play structures filled with yelling kids, a the little zoo with buzzards and roosters and peacocks, the ruins of a 13th century church and convent, waterparks and fountains, hotels and hot baths, numerous ball fields, and even a small Japanese(-like) Garden. In the Japanese Garden, there was Koi pond with many turtles in it, and we spent quite a while watching the turtles sunbathing on rocks while little kids giddily tried to pet them.
Today, I think we'll probably take the rest of the day easy. Some cafe time with our "research survey", maybe a short trip to the free museums accross the street from our hotel and maybe I'll finally go on my photo walk at dusk that I've been wanting to do. Tomorrow is the train trip to the city of Pesc in southern Hungary where we'll be staying in a hostel for the night and then a visit to a rehab hospital nearby the next day for the last bit of research. Nice.
This morning, after another slow breakfast (this really is vacation), we went to Margaret Island, a large park in between Buda and Pest. We walked the length of the park and back, though large fields, past play structures filled with yelling kids, a the little zoo with buzzards and roosters and peacocks, the ruins of a 13th century church and convent, waterparks and fountains, hotels and hot baths, numerous ball fields, and even a small Japanese(-like) Garden. In the Japanese Garden, there was Koi pond with many turtles in it, and we spent quite a while watching the turtles sunbathing on rocks while little kids giddily tried to pet them.
Today, I think we'll probably take the rest of the day easy. Some cafe time with our "research survey", maybe a short trip to the free museums accross the street from our hotel and maybe I'll finally go on my photo walk at dusk that I've been wanting to do. Tomorrow is the train trip to the city of Pesc in southern Hungary where we'll be staying in a hostel for the night and then a visit to a rehab hospital nearby the next day for the last bit of research. Nice.
Saturday, April 05, 2008
Finally, some pics!
* Climbing gym in Budapest - yes, we did finally find one! *
* SB knitting on the metro - she gets a lot of stares (mostly from curious old ladies) *
* Rehabilitation house run by an old pastor and his wife *
* The inside courtyard of the rehab house *
* Eating deep fried Hungarian pastries covered with sour cream *
* Pretty street near sunset *
* Basilica in Budapest *
* Young free tibet protester *
* Free Tibet protest *
* SB at flea market *
* Cheering on the Hungarian and Polish girls handball teams *
* SB knitting in our hotel room *
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)