Heading Back to the West Coast Best Coast!

Yesterday I found out that I matched to an anesthesiology program in Oregon, which means I'm heading back to the west coast! I am so excited! It was really fun to celebrate with all my friends and it was nice to have my parents there too. Good times!

Matched!

A few days late, but I realized I forgot to make a post about the most exciting moment of the week so far! I matched into an anesthesiology residency, which means I am officially employed! Terrifying and exciting all at the same time. I can't until Friday to find out where I'm heading for the next four years of my life.

In other news, I am sick again. No fun at all. Just when I though I had finally completely beat my South American virus, a new one reared its ugly head (or the old one just decided to come back with a vengeance). Regardless, I'm hoping it goes away before match day! 

Tag Days Huge Success!

Last night was the annual Galens End of the Year Banquet! We all had a great time celebrating the year and most importantly found out how much we raised during Tag Days 2015! The grand total was over $90,100!!! That was about 20% more than we raised last year, and last year was the most Galens had ever raised. It was quite amazing and we are all so proud and excited to have so much to give to organizations supporting children in Washtenaw County! 

Other than the banquet, I completed my first week of Pulm Consults. It was a good week, but next week I'm sure I will be a bit distracted with the match and everything. Can't wait though!!

Pulmonary Consults

Today I started my pulmonary consults rotation. Boy oh boy have I forgotten a bunch over the last few months! Just need to keep reading and I'll be fine, but I definitely felt stupid today. Luckily my team is awesome and understands what its like to be an M4 and be away from clinical duties for months at a time. Hopefully it will be an interesting month. Not too stressful yet, but I was dying from being tired all day. I'm not used to having to be so on! Anyways, hoping I don't accidentally nap so I can go to bed nice and early and be really well rested tomorrow... If not, theres plenty of Crystal Light with caffeine in my pantry!

Weekend at Home

This is the first time I have spent this long in Ann Arbor in quite a long time. I have taken this opportunity to start cleaning some things I've been dying to clean out! Today, the task was my desk. It was daunting and took most of the day, but it is now much less cluttered and somewhat organized. Much better feeling for sure! The rest of the room will have to wait until later, but it's definitely a start!

Other than cleaning I haven't done much. I went to the Smoker last night, which is the annual medical student run musical roast of our faculty. It was great and I enjoyed it a lot. I have otherwise just been hanging out and attempting to mentally prepare myself to start back with real work tomorrow. I'm failing a bit, since it had been so long since I've had to go to work at the hospital, but even worse, I can't wear scrubs this month, ugh! Oh well!

Now I'm going to fold all my laundry and I will have gotten a lot accomplished today I think. I still need to force myself to go to the grocery store though, and to get my things together for my new rotation tomorrow. I just wish they told me where to meet or when to meet tomorrow. Very frustrating!

Home

Here's how my traveling went: Bus to Santiago, another bus to the airport, flight to Lima, go through immigration in Lima, pick up bag and go through customs, recheck bag, fly to Miami, immigration and customs in Miami, pick up and drop off bag, fly to Detroit, pick up bag, get uber, get home!! It was a long one, but all went off without a hitch. I was initially worried about doing all I had to do in Lima since my initial flight had been cancelled and I was rebooked on a later flight, but I made it no problem, yay!

The worst part was landing to this view after getting so used to summer:

Snow everywhere

When I got home I chilled for a bit and then went to the doctor for a TB test and to make sure I wasn't too sick for patients on Monday. Should be fine, but can't guarantee I'm not contagious (don't tell Molly!). Luckily I'm feeling a lot better overall. I think I definitely had a fever in Valparaíso, but it's gone now. Since then I've been enjoying hanging out at home! 

Also, I watched Room on the flight from Miami to Detroit since I rented it. It was pretty good! Really well acted for sure. 

Adios

Today I stayed at the bed and breakfast all day since o wasn't feeling awesome and I'm just overall tired. My original flight to Lima was cancelled and I'm rescheduled on a flight three hours later. Hopefully no delays! I'm heading for the bus now and next time I have Internet I'll be back in the USA!

La Gripe and Cooking Classes

First and foremost I woke up this morning feeling horrible. Body aches, headache, stuffy nose, the works. I went down to breakfast and immediately went back up to nap until noon. Even at that point I was struggling to get out of bed since my body hurt so bad. I eventually took a naproxen and a shower and felt a bit better so o decided to go to the cooking class I booked for the afternoon and evening. On my way to meet the class I stopped at the bank and then sat down (before I was told by a navy man that I as no aloud to sit, boo).

I met the group at 3:30PM and we decided what we were going to cook. We then took the bus to the market and got our ingredients before taking the bus back to Cerro Conception to cook. We made a salsa to go with bread, cebiche, empanadas, pastel de choclo, and a Chilean papaya dessert boiled with sugar and cinnamon. We also made Pisco sours and had some white and red Chilean wines. It was all delicious and I had a great time. Unfortunately now on feeling achy and tired again so this post will be quite short. Tomorrow starts the long journey back to Michigan. 

In the Market

Cleaning the fish for our cebiche

Cebiche pre lemon juice

Ready to marinate

The finished cebiche

Making Pisco Sours

Empanada all filled up with meat, onion, and hard boiled egg

My beautiful empanada before baking

So good!

Pastel de choclo ready for baking

The pastel ready to be eaten!

Exploring Valpo

Hello everyone! I was recently made aware that people other than my family have been following my adventures. Welcome! Also, I sincerely apologize that I am a boring and horrible writer. At least the pictures are cool (I think). I recently read the dirty of Anne Frank and the fact that she wrote so eloquently at such a young age is incredible. This will never be like that at all haha. Tonight I decided to change things up and instead of writing before I got to sleep I am writing on the terrace of a cute restaurant where I am eating dinner called Viavia. So here goes yet another description of a day in the life of Missy in South America!

This morning I woke up around 9AM and headed downstairs to breakfast. The owners of the bed and breakfast made eggs, and there was bread, tea and pineapple juice. I then contemplated getting ready for the day, but instead vegged and binged watched Fuller House. I've now seen 10 of the 13 episodes. I'm guessing I finish before I leave Chile. Around 1:30-2PM I finally got ready and headed out to Plaza Sotomayor. I was going to find somewhere for lunch, but by the time I wandered I only had a half hour before the free walking tour was beginning from that location, so I grabbed a caprese focaccia and a passion ice tea lemonade from Starbucks. So exciting and original, right?! I ate outside on the plaza and enjoyed the warmth until I met the tour. 

Pedestrian street on my walk down the hill

Plaza Sotomayor and the memorial for War of the Pacific

Naval building in Plaza Sotomayor

The tour was with a company called Tours for Tips that runs tours in Valparaíso and Santiago. Since we only had one day in Santiago and we were exhausted we skipped out on it there, but I decided to do it here. We started at the port and learned about how it used to be the most important in Latin America during the gold rush when boats had to take the long way around. When the Panama Canal opened the port lost much of its importance, and the city starting losing importance as well. It's now not even the most important port in all of Chile, but the city is still very interesting. We walked through Cerro Conception and Cerro Alegre, two of the hill neighborhoods in Valpo and saw a lot of street art, nice views, and learned some interesting factoids. We also took the tram a few stops and took one of the acensors (basically little funiculars that were built to help the people get around the hills since it would definitely be a LOT of uphill walking). We learned that the houses are so colorful because the working class had to by the materials used to weigh down the ships from Europe that had carried produce from Chile so that they wouldn't tip on the journey back. This included mud, straw, wood, and metal siding. Because of the sea air the metal would easily rust and the sea of grey building was unappealing, so people would ask for the leftover paint and combine it together to make enough pint to paint the buildings. The street art is also plentiful, but illegal nonetheless. Apparently they work in teams of roughly 30 and each has a job so the whole mural is completed in the night in about 2 minutes! Crazy! 

Look up the acensor

Our guide

Going up the acensor

View of Valaparaíso

The slide we all went down

Mural on a huge building

Street art with a view

The first church with a cross in Chile (and I think South America)

Lukas

Cool street art

More street art

When you walk down the stairs they look grey, but when you go up they are quite colorful

We got a little taste of food in Chile when we stopped at a little place where a man sold alfajor (a cookie with dulce de leche and dipped in chocolate) and empanadas. We all got an alfajor with the tour and I bought an empanada with cheese and mushrooms. We also saw a house built by a Croatian who didn't want a family or a spouse, didn't want to work, and made his money by buying milk and meat and selling it to others. He even took a donkey north to the desert in San Pedro to sell milk and meat to miners. The rest he got by periodically traveling back to Croatia and asking for money. He also collected a ton of art that he put in his mansion. When he died he obviously had no heirs, so the mansion was passed on to his nephews who had no interest in Chile. They eventually sold it to the government and it because the fine art museum of Valparaíso. Interesting story I thought. The tour ended with a sampling is chicha, a drink made of old white wine and sugar or something like that, and then gave our tips and went on our way. I almost signed up for their bike tour of the white wine vineyard region, but decided there were other things I wanted to do tomorrow and I live close enough to Napa that I won't die if I miss a wine tour. I'll just go up this summer. 

Our faithful maker of alfajors and empanadas

Really cool mural done by Cherkipunk, a famous muralist who always includes hummingbirds in his work

I next walked back to the port because I wanted to see the artesenia of course. Instead I ended up taking a lancha, which is a boat that the load up and for about $5 they take you on the water of the coast. The tour was unfortunately all in Spanish, which was fast fast fast, so I didn't catch much, but it was still pretty. I then walked back to my bed and breakfast since it was after 7PM and took the Acensor Conception to get up the hill. Tengo un poquito gripe hoy (I have a little cold today, ugh), so I was very ready to rest. When I opened the door to my room the cat who lives in the bed and breakfast bolted in. She totally just wanted to be loved and clung to the bedspread so I had to literally pry her off to get her out. She's really cute at least! I hung out, talked to my mom, and caught up on emails until I ventured out to dinner. I also signed up for a cooking class tomorrow, so stayed tuned to learn about that! Should be fun times. 

Valparaiso from the water

I set out to go to a restaurant from my guide book, but it was closed so I found this place Viavia while wandering because they had soup, which sounded great with my cold. Sadly the soup was a cold gazpacho, so I got a chicken pesto crepe instead. It was delicious, but too much food! I also had two bottle of expensive water because upon my first sip I realized I was exceptionally thirsty. Now I'm ready to pay the bill. I think I'll grab a small dessert at a cute place nearby and then buy some water to drink tonight. A Benadryl is also likely in store tonight. Ciao!

Chicken pesto crepe