Lima hospitals

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Monday was back to the grind. We actually had to get up early again. Boarded our little bus and took off for our first hospital visit. Our time in Lima is spent touring local hospitals and seeing interesting cases. The health care system here is somewhat socialized. Basically, everyone has free health care, from the jungle people to the lawyers. However, you get what you pay for. If you don´t have any money to pay, you get the ministry hospitals (like free health clinics) with underpaid doctors, poor facilities, and very little treatments (for example, they might intubate your family member because they need it, but if you want something to treat their pneumonia they´ll write you a prescription and send you to the pharmacy to buy it). The next option is to get something like social security hospital, where it´s a little nicer with slightly better staff. You get that if you have certain jobs, with health care included. Next is the private insurance where you have pretty decent hospitals with good doctors, on par with what you would get in the US. That requires paying a premium and is generally just the middle to upper class. There are also military hospitals, but only for military.

At the first hospital (one of the free ministry hospitals) the ward was just a big open floor with about 6 patients in beds along the wall with no real divider besides a little nightstand. The cases weren´t that exotic there. A really bad case of erysipelas (like cellulitis, but nastier), a couple of HIV cases, and a mystery. Not very happy looking people. Not the best place to be, either. After our little visit there, we moved on to the next hospital, which happened to be the leading neuropsychiatric center in all of Peru. In fact, the guy who runs it is the world´s leading expert (according to whom, I´m not sure), on cysticercosis (what happens when you eat a pork tapeworm egg. It hatches and the larvae go all over your body, especially the brain. VERY common in developing countries, and the #1 cause of new onset seizures in this area. Mexico has A LOT of cases of it). Our expert gave us a tour of the facility, then into the museum of brains. They actually had a collection of fetuses in jars with different conditions. Very interesting, very unique collection (not many like that around). Only a few, but with very interesting conditions (from a scientific standpoint anyway). They also had jars and jars of brains. All with different diseases. The jars in the back were just brains, it was hard to tell the difference. In the middle room they had brains sliced up and preserved, so you could see slices of brain with MANY different conditions (almost anything you can imagine).

Our next stop was lunch, where we went for Chifa food (Chinese. It´s pretty big here actually, with a thriving Chinatown). Peru has a decent mix of people (not unlike Hawaii). Many people here look very Incan, and are direct descendants of the Incas (overthrown in the 1500s). Also a lot of Spanish blood (obviously -- they conqured the Inca in the 1500s), but also a lot of Japanese and Chinese (the "coolies" from the time of the railroads), and some black-african slave descendants. Not to mention a few other things thrown in, but that´s primarily what you see here. Most people (in the cities, not the jungle) are a mix. The Chinese food was nothing to write home about, but it gave me a GREAT option to get lots of cash from my credit card and solve that little ATM card problem.

We reboarded the bus and headed back for the hotel. By that time it was early afternoon, with nothing to do until we were meeting for dinner at 7:30. I took off with Edwin and we went shopping at the mall. Can´t remember if I mentioned it before, but the mall is built right into the cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Really cool. Also pretty upscale. A very nice mall! There are only a few things that Peru is really known for: very pure silver, and Alpaca wool. I figured that those are 2 things I should shop for. Well, I bought neither, but I did get this great pewter salad spoon/fork set (silver would have cost an arm and a leg). In the handle are these red and black seeds called huayruru which give you good luck (unfortunately they only give you good luck if you get them as a gift, but the lady behind the counter didn´t think it was that funny when I asked her to give them to me so I could have good luck). They´re actually really pretty. I already have my eye on a really nice cheese board from the indian market that has those seeds inset in the end. Otherwise we just shopped around and compared Alpaca prices (his whole family wants either silver or alpaca. I doubt they have any idea how expensive that is...) Edwin is actually a really good shopping buddy, and we just had a really nice relaxed time at the mall. I found out that most Alpaca sweaters are ugly and expensive. There are 2 kinds really: Alpaca, which is from the back and is more coarse, and baby alpaca which is from the chest and is extremely fine and soft. Alpaca, by the way, is a llama looking thing. Apparently, there are many alpaca fakes here so you have to be careful where you shop (which is why I wanted to go to the boutiques in the mall first). They either mix in llama or acrylic with your possibly alpaca sweater. At least from a reliable store you can be pretty sure it´s real. Sweaters ran about $100 generally. I thought about it, but didn´t really find any sweaters I liked. The shawls, however, are really nice and very Peruvian. As we were walking back from the mall, we popped into an alpaca store and looked around. I immediately was drawn to this absolutely incredible white baby alpaca shawl with fur around the collar and hem. It had one button at the neck. It was SOOOO beautiful! I liken it to a fur coat, but I don´t think fur coats are that great looking. The only problem is that it really needs to go with a beatiful evening gown, diamond earrings, and a really fancy updo, on a night to the opera or ballet. And it´s been a while since I´ve been to the opera or ballet (a while = never). However, I´m still very close to splurging and buying it. Oh, by the way, did I mention it was $350? Quite a splurge for someone who has never spent more than $200 on ANY piece of clothing, and that itself was a huge splurge (in Norway, in fact). The more I think about it, though, the more I want it. I´ll have to post the picture of it so everyone can admire the beauty. We´re coming back to Lima on Friday and I have time to shop, so I have until then to decide. I would LOVE any comments or suggestions, especially from those old and wisened enough to look back and see how they felt about THEIR splurge purchases...

For dinner we all met up in the lobby of the hotel, but ended up splitting up the group again (everyone else wanted to go to the Argentinian beef place but 4 of us had already done it). The 4 of us went to a local sushi place that is well known for their quality. Sushi Edo was possibly the best sushi I´ve ever had. The rolls were very unique and tasted incredible. Everything was extremely fresh too. I actually hadn´t eaten sushi since finishing the book The Zen of Fish (a must for anyone who like sushi) and feeling like a dumb westerner who doesn´t know how to eat sushi. It was a nice reintroduction back into the world of sushi. Soooo good..... mmmm....

We just came back after that and settled in for the night. When you LEAVE to eat at 7:30, you really end up just eating and that´s it. No time for much else when you have to be up so early. Ah early days...

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