Until Friday night, the rains had been coming conveniently after I already got home for the night, and I could comfortably listen to those beautiful summery thunderstorms and downpours from inside the comfort of my room. I finally gave up on figuring out the dorm's laundry system and brought my laundry to a nearby laundromat last week, and when I went to go pick it up on Friday I got caught in a massive rainstorm that required I take an otherwise unneeded taxi home to avoid soaking all my fresh clean, very wrinkly clothes. I have been told that the start of the rainy season is usually accompanied by a bunch of little critters showing up. I'm assuming that because of this, I was visited by a little froggy who somehow showed up in my room one night, and who was having a very endearing battle with my walls, which are plastic and he
couldn't get his little sticky feet to stick to. I spent about 10 minutes ushering him out the front door of the dorms, which I afterwards realized probably looked very, very curious on the security cameras. Oh well.
My internship has been chugging along pretty much as it should, as of Friday I have completed 109 hours, so I am getting towards the required minimum of 135. I started working with the another one of the women in the department, Fernanda, to do surveys with hospitalized patients about the factors that they take into account when they decided which hospital to go to (i.e. if their insurance provider decided, if it was their doctor, if they had known other people who had been to our hospital, etc.) I had to get a rapid intro course on how insurance works here in terms of social security, copays, deductibles and discounts - it still isn't all that clear to me. At any rate, we are supposed to have 100 of these surveys completed by Thursday of this coming week, and in the past 2 weeks we have only done a grand total of about 40 so we aren't doing to0 hot. I did my first solo surveys on Thursday and got about 8 done, so hopefully in the coming week we can get a lot more done, even if it isn't quite 100. The other main thing I've been working on is creating flow charts for some of the packets we have that are a little bit more complicated so that everyone involved in the process, from checking the patient in until they leave, knows what is supposed to happen when.
The highlight of this past week was definitely the field trip we took to Mexico City and Teotihuacan yesterday. It was really nice to get out of Puebla, have some time to get to know my new fellow exchangies, and chat with Ignacio and his assistant, Karla.
They started us off with a guided tour of the Diego Rivera murals in the Palacio Nacional, which is right on the central square in Mexico City. However, in light of the upcoming bicentennial(of independence)/centennial(of revolution) celebration, everything seems to be under construction and getting renovated, so their was a ton of construction going on. Our guide was only partially understandable, but he clearly had a sense of humor and got pretty excited about some Diego murals.
The Anthropology museum was lovely, I think there were some international anthro exhibits, but we just perused the prehispanic civilizations ones. There were lots of interesting stone sculptures and artifacts from the mayans, aztecs, olmecs, and some more minor civilizations, but the biggie was definitely the misnomered Aztec "Calendar."
We made it to the Teotihuacan pyramids around 3ish, and after all three of us white girls were appropriately spf50ed up, we took off to explore the site. We were definitely not alone, there were tons of other people there, both Mexican and other. We learned that with our university IDs from the Iberoamericana we can get into a lot of these sites for free. Exciting!
The Piramide del Sol is the larger pyramid, we counted somewhere between 246-250 steps to get to the top. It was definitely some good exercise, and my thighs certainly are feeling the burn today. Here Selina, Tiffany, and I are at the top of the big pyramid, the one in the background is the Piramide de la Luna.
Here Tiffany and I are, after climbing the much more modest steps of the smaller pyramid (that is the big Piramide del Sol in the background). They also don't let you go up to the top like on the big pyramid. I wish we had a guide to take us through the whole site, because I felt like there was a lot to know about what all when on in all the mini-pyramids that we walked past, and there were a ton of other smaller stone structures scattered around. It was still a beautiful day with some decent exercise and a lot of history.
I started my Latin America and its Cultures class last week, but Monday will be my first Spanish for Health Care Professionals class, and next weekend we will be doing a mini medical service trip to a town outside of Puebla, so more news later!
No comments:
Post a Comment