celiasprague

Well, the sun is just as strong and the sky is just as clear as the last time I wrote! Everyday, I wake up sweating. What was I thinking coming here in the middle of the summer!? And to cap it all off, Blake has been giving me updates on the weather in Morocco which is usually a daily high of a staggering 50 degrees! Eeeep. So my Maltese life is becoming more and more routine now. My days are beginning to blend together and my familiarity of the island is getting better. In Malta, despite the insane heat, the summer is packed with festivals and events which I have been doing my best to take advantage of. During my first week on the island, Andrew and I were so keen to hit the beach every ... read more

I'm sorry that I haven't been able to upload pics. I just spent the last hour trying to make it work... the computers here are not the best and the internet is incredibly slow! Since I'm 'stealing' internet time at the Faculty of Medicine's Physician's room I have to be quick... Since the first week, things here have improved significantly! Since then, I've really gotten to know the surgeons and the students in my department and they now are more than happy to include me in the OR and on ward rounds. Actually, I'm spending most of my time in the hospital - yesterday I was there from 7am until 9:30 pm! I'm learning so much from the docs and the residents & interns. I'm now somewhat competent at suturing - I was able to put ... read more

Leaving PP, I jumped on a bus to Kampot - a small town supposedly only 3 hrs away. Six hours of bumping along unpaved roads in a public bus that surprisingly made it in one piece and I finally arrived. I had stopped in Kampot because I was eager to go hiking in Bokor National Park. Unfortunately, when I arrived, I was told that the Bokor mountain was closed to tourists and everyone else because some foreign investor had somehow bought the mountain (!??!) and was building a 400 room hotel and a casino. UGH. I wasn't happy about that. Instead, I spent the afternoon and the next morning just wandering about town. There weren't any other tourists really and the town was really interesting. It was built beside a river and had remnants of French ... read more

After a whirlwind couple of days in Ho Chi Minh City, I was ready to chill out on our supposedly very relaxing three day boat trip along the Mekong Delta. Sightseeing by boat is a very different experience compared to staring out of the window of a bus. Although it was a slow way to travel, I really enjoyed it and was able to see how ppl lived along the Mekong and experience their way of life. The first two days of our trip invovled travelling in a small boat, first along the Saigon river, out to the Mekong, then around many of the Mekong Delta's islands where we got off multiple times to visit setup tourist 'attractions'. These tourist sights were always demonstrations of how the Vietnamese produced some sort of food product. Called 'factories' ... read more

It's true - you can smell Mui Ne before you can see it! Mui Ne is a small fishing town where fish sauce is mass produced then shipped to Thailand before it can be exported abroad under the pretense that it was actually manufactured in Thailand, not Vietnam (apparently Vietnam doesn't have high enough hygienic standards to be granted exporting licenses). Food for thought when making Pad Thai back home...! Despite the very strong fish smell, Mui Ne is LOVELY. Unfortunately, unlike Nha Trang which made sure that hotels and resorts weren't built beach-side so that public could still have access, Mui Ne's stretch of beach is now lined with resorts. We found a cheap, but wonderful bungalow for $4/night with a perfect patch of beach, hammocks and really delicious mango shakes - all a girl ... read more