Advertisement
Published: September 16th 2007
Edit Blog Post
Mt. Maunganui and Tauranga Harbor
After a Hard days work, I still get to come home and look at this. First Week of Work:
I don’t think anyone will be surprised that work is work. Many of the same rules apply in the Southern Hemisphere as in the Northern. You have to show up. You must fulfill your job description to get paid. Alas, it is not Nirvana. However, there are some differences. It is OK to break for tea. Thus far, surgeons are extremely polite. It is busy, but it is not service on demand. Emergencies are defined differently than in the states and have more to do with medical necessity than legal necessity. Although, not completely absent, there seems to be less CYA. This is a training program. Training radiologists are known as registrars (residents in the states). We have two registrars, a first year and a third year. Their training is five years with the last two years spent in Auckland. After training, they often go to Austrailia, UK, Canada, or the States for work or fellowship training. National Health Care is not too dissimilar to Medicaid and Medicare. It does not pay for everything. Private insurance is available. It is still better to be rich. Most comparison and contrasts would be boring except to other radiologists,
Mt. Ruapehu
View from National Park so I will spare you. British spellings are the rule: centre for center, oedema for edema, or haematoma for hematoma. Pronunciations are often different like a hard “c” instead of a soft or “s” sounding “c” as in hydrocephalous, pronounced hydro-kef-a-lus. I sometimes don’t understand all of a conversation until the person I am conversing with has left the room. So far, I find that Kiwis are a lot like southerners, we politely smile and pretend we know what each other is talking about. I report films instead of dictate. The transcriptionists are stationed in the department. We are becoming fast friends. I finally learned to stop correcting the British spellings. I confess that I was a little slow on the uptake.
Of matters of more practical concern, I have learned several important vocabulary lesions that are of great importance:
A biscuit is a cookie.
A scone is a biscuit.
A cookie is something on your computer.
I am told that a savory scone is best.
Girl Scout cookies = Girl Guide Biscuits
Jelly is Jell-O.
Jam is jelly.
Rubbers are erasers.
If you hear someone say “Spear tears,” it means spare tires spelled tyres.
Mt. Ruapehu
View on the Ski Fields of Mt. Ruapehu Lollys are candy.
Suckers are sweets.
Skiing on Mt. Ruapehu
On the week end, we again headed south. Our destination was the ski fields of Mt. Ruapehu - specifically Whakapapa. Mt Ruapehu is an active volcano. No worries, it hasn’t erupted since 1995. Apparently this was a great idea, as I think everyone on the North Island went with us. Sarah spent about eight hours calling every hotel, motel, and no tell trying to get a place for us to sleep. (Sarah - After I spent an entire day doing this, an innkeeper was kind enough to share a website called Need-It-Now.com. You tell it what area you want to stay and it lists the rooms available. Most motels have “family rooms” with either two rooms or a queen bed with two twins squished in somehow. And there are lots of backpackers or “dorms”. I really tried to stay away from that.) We landed in a town outside of Whakapapa know as National Park. There we were introduced to one of the more common types of accommodations, backpackers. Back packers are typically low frills (Sarah- We slept in sleeping bags and “hired” towels for the night) sleeping
quarters that share rooms with four or more bunk beds and common areas like a kitchen, TV, or game room. Ours was clean and had six bunks crammed into the room. (Sarah - Think of it as a train berth with a kitchenette) We paid extra for the whole room. (Sarah - We were the oldest in the complex by at least 20 years. I think most of the kids that worked on the mountain also lived there during the skiing months. One of the places I called asked how old we were. They only accommodated persons between the ages of 18 and 35.) The mountain is very scenic and it is an easy drive to the base where a shuttle takes you the rest of the way. The skiing is better in the South Island and the Colorado Rockies, but neither is within driving distance of our house. The weather was nice the first afternoon and so - so the following day. People were everywhere and they closed the mountain at some point. (Sarah - They report the weather as “fine”. Because our weather in Tauranga is pretty much the same each day, I hear, “Tomorrow will be fine
Ski Action
Don't try this at home! with some scattered clouds. Tues will be fine and Wed will be fine. Thursday will be rainy in the a.m. and then…fine.” So I had to laugh when the guy who rented us our skis said they had not had many “fine” weekends this winter.) I was prideful in my skiing abilities until I fell at a T-Bar lift. Many were entertained by my impersonation of a turtle on its back, unable to right itself. Sarah, a better skier than I, took a tumble and was plowed into by a snow boarder (Sarah - First of all, I had no edge on my skis. No turning to the right at all. Second, I went off a CLIFF and thought I had broken my neck. Just when I could breathe again, a snowboarder took the CLIFF jump that I just went over and beaned me in the ribs with his body. “No worries”, he was up and gone. I took the next lift down.) Time to call it a day. (Sarah - Actually, Mark, Grace and Ben kept on skiing and Grace went over a cliff. But she is young. She did not require muscle relaxers or pain meds.)
Advertisement
Tot: 0.077s; Tpl: 0.036s; cc: 8; qc: 20; dbt: 0.0277s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1mb
steve
non-member comment
wish I was there
I wish someone would take me on a ski trip in NZ