Anywhere in the world...

Hi there; Birdie here!

So the pre-vet forum at SDN--which is one of the reasons I started a blog in the first place--has started a Blog Topic of the Week thread. The question I'm answering is not vet school-related at all: "If you could go on vacation anywhere in the world, where would you go? What would you do while there (activities, attractions, food, etc)?" Instead of a hypothetical, though, I'm going to talk about an actual dream trip that I got to go on.

For my graduation present, I really wanted to go to Thailand with my dad, and I'm so grateful he made that happen! In fact, we didn't only visit Thailand--we went several places in Japan and to Cambodia as well as a stopover in Seoul. I call it our Asiadventure. It was 10 cities in two weeks, and it was amazing! Since it was so long and we did so much stuff, I'm going to only talk about Japan in this post. Maybe next time I'm procrastinating studying I'll add another post about it!

I'm going to tell this story in mostly pictures, largely because of how long it would be if I didn't...

Our first stop was Fukuoka, Japan. It's not necessarily a major tourist destination, and I don't exactly think its one of the Japanese cities everyone knows. But it's the city where two of my friends did study abroad, and I wanted to do some of the things they did!

Dancing fountain show the first night, in the mall our hotel was basically attached to.

 This type of gate means behind it is a Shinto shrine. This one was Daizeifu Shrine, in honor of a scholar.

 His family had a tie to plum blossoms, so they were all over the place. No, I don't know what the sign says; I don't know nearly enough kanji for that.

Here's a picture of the shrine...one of many temples in our visit.

 Neko Cafe (cat cafe)! It's a restaurant/coffeeshop type deal, and they have a bunch of cats hanging around. They have toys for you to play with them, and my dad and I even got to feed them some treats!

 So you can have some idea how many cats there were...but there were more. They swarmed around us when we had food for them! They were quite polite about our lunches though.

See the fish swimming around in there? This is a restaurant called Zauo, and you catch your own fish from here and they prepare it for you! I got a tempura flounder, and dad got red snapper sashimi. It was really good, and super fresh of course!

Not pictured: using my Japanese skills to get Iced Cocoa (which tasted rather like YooHoo) out of a vending machine instead of all the coffee drinks I didn't want. Yay for reading katakana!

Our next destination in Japan was Hiroshima. Looking around there at all the monuments and museum and everywhere a call for peace, I thought that world leaders should all need to visit here when they get elected/chosen however. We were here for less than a day, perusing all this before moving on.

 The A-Bomb Dome: the only structure left standing in the area after the bombing.

 Paper cranes: it's said that if you fold 1,000 of them, your wish will come true. Children in Japan fold them, wishing for peace, for this monument, in memory of Sadako, an athletic little girl who died of leukemia from prenatal radiation.

 This is the children's bell. There are apparently always school trips, where the children come out to the children's monument and do a little ritual/ceremony/song for peace. The top of the bell where it hits to make noise looks like another folded crane.

Line of monuments; they're all set in a line, so if you look through that arch at the end you can see all of them.

Shinkansen! The bullet train we took between different cities in Japan.

Not pictured: We had Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki, with layers of batter, cabbage, bean sprouts, meat, noodles, and egg. There is also Osaka style, where everything is mixed up together.

The next stop was Osaka. If you're an anime fan/have watched Azumanga Daioh, you'll recognize the name of where one of the characters came from. They're known for a distinctive way of talking, great comedy, and being major extroverts.

 Osaka Castle, where I learned about Hideyoshi. He was a clever guy who flooded castles and had a gold tea set, but when he died with no sons of ruling age there was a Summer War due to the traitor among the five who had promised to carry on his line.

 The main keep is on its 3rd or 4th iteration. The first was black lacquer, but the rest are white plaster.

 These little guys are on a lot of historic buildings. They're supposed to guard from fire, but they don't work too well.

 Dotonbori, the massive shopping district.

IIRC, this picture was taken from the "seduction bridge." The Japanese term literally means fishing; it's where guys fish for single girls, apparently.

Kyoto was the next city we visited, and this area was my personal favorite. There were so many cool things to see and do here! 

 Famous zen garden at Ryoanji temple

 This was the moss garden, which I thought was even nicer than the rocky zen garden.

 The whole grounds of Ryoanji temple were beautiful. I really like this picture, so I'm throwing it in here.

 The Golden Pavilion! Built by the magistrate who betrayed Hideyoshi; the whole outside is covered with gold foil 0.2 microns thick. I have a scroll of it hanging in my room at school that I got from the gift shop.

 This is another picture from the Golden Pavilion area, and another one I just like a lot. This one I blew up and framed in the guest room at my parents' house.

I didn't take these picture, but these are a signature sweet of Kyoto. I called them "Kyoto triangles," but googling to find this picture tells me they're actually called yatsuhashi. They're steamed mochi (soft rice dough) surrounding a sweet red bean paste, although there were other flavors that we saw later on. These are really good!

 Nishiki food market! I was really excited about getting to see all the foods I wouldn't even know what they were, and it did not disappoint.

 A lot of restaurants used plastic food like this to advertise; the practice started in Osaka.

A very old traditional Japanese shop.

 Shogun's private quarters at Nijo Castle (actually, this is probably the more public part--I don't think we could take pictures in the actual private quarters).

 Nijo Castle is famous for its Nightingale Floor--it's purposely squeaky in the rooms for receiving former enemies, so you know if they're sneaking up behind you!

 Japanese gardens have 3 elements: water, trees, and rocks. Rocks are most important since they don't change, so they worked very hard to find the perfect rock to be a bridge here.

Kiyomizu temple ("pure water temple") is dedicated to making wishes come true. Pictured here is the purification ritual, which we encountered in many Japanese temples: wash left hand, then right hand, rinse the mouth using your left hand, then pour the rest over the handle.

Not pictured: The delicious skewers we had at a restaurant that does lunch for salarymen. The miso soup was really good, and there were about 6 skewers with chicken and different sauces, which were all delicious. We also had Kobe beef at a fancy teppanyaki place with a yummy salty "baked" potato traingle and orange ice cream

Nara was basically a day trip from Kyoto, and I'm including it with Kyoto as my favorite part of the trip. It was the ancient capital of Japan in the 700s.

 In Nara park, the deer are so used to people they'll come right up to you! They sell packets of crackers you can feed them (which we did, twice). There was even one deer lying on the ground who let me sit next to him and pet him! His antlers were all velvety-soft.

 The (supposedly) largest Bhudda, at Todaiji Temple. He had four guards (more figures), one for each direction.

 Kasuga Taisha Shrine, with all these stone lanterns. Some had wood (even a stump that looked like it had been cut out of a tree and placed there) as a box for the light in the lantern. There were many young babies and a wedding here: Shintoism is for your happiness (in the present), so they have a baptism-like ritual there, while Bhuddism is for your ancestors/place in heaven.

 As we drove, we happened upon this festival! I got to eat a taiyaki (fried pastry in the shape of a fish, filled with sweet red bean paste), which is one of the best things I ate while there. Also I got a kimono!

 I recognized this game at the festival because we played it in the Japanese language club in undergrad. You use a hook on the end of a paper to try and pick up the balloon toys by a loop in a long rubber band stretching from the end without the hook breaking off (which it will if the paper gets wet). Then the balloon is like a yo-yo!

 We spent just one night at the ryokan, a traditional Japanese Inn.

 I took a bath in this tub at the ryokan.

 They lent us clothes to relax in (we wore them to dinner and referred to them as our "dinner uniforms") as well as the pink pajamas. Dinner had 9 courses--super fancy!--and the best thing was the iris cake, which was shaped like a little plum with an edible gold leaf and was made out of purple and yellow sweet potatoes.

 Zen garden at the ryokan

You can see the different little buildings people stay in

Not pictured: the little hard candies our fantastic driver Ozaki-san kept putting in the back for us since we had long drives (the peach ones were my favorite), and a tea ceremony with jelly cake type things and ginger chips. It was at Hakusason-so, an artist's former residence. We got prints of the artists work, too! Mine has a gray horse on a pale gold background, and dad got a ship that's supposed to bring in money.

Final stop in Japan was the current capital: Tokyo!

 Megane bridge, so called because with the reflection it looks like glasses

 Wedding (I think) procession at the Shinto shrine

 The big main street of Harajuku, Tokyo's youthful fashion district

 This is the sort of thing you see in Harajuku. Also cosplay outfits for sale!

 The Akihabara region started with electronics and gained more Japanese nerdiness

 We visited the Pokemon Center to get a bunch of stuff for my little brother

e We weren't in time to get a reservation to see the tuna auction, but we still got to see Tsukiji fish market. These things were all over the place, and frequently come close to running people over. You have to watch out for them!

 Look at all the fish! Also octopus.

 Giant tuna--this is how big a tuna is.

 This is what wasabi looks like when it's not already paste.

The last thing we did in Japan was a cooking lesson. We went to our sensei's house, and we were expecting just one sushi roll each or something, but instead we had a feast! We chopped things and cooked things and washed things and rolled sushi, and we also got red snapper (a fish for special occasions, according to our sensei), sesame-cooked carrot and burdock, miso soup, and a mess of tempura including leaves that she referred to as Japanese basil. I also tried on a kimono (the obi felt a bit like a corset) and then we had an impromptu tea ceremony with green tea mochi filled with red bean and a pastry with white filling that's apparently famous. When you drink ceremonial green tea, you turn the cup because you're not supposed to drink from its front.

Oh, actually that wasn't the last thing--we finished off with a visit to a maid cafe, but we couldn't take pictures inside. It was called @home, and when you enter they greet you with おかえり ("welcome home"/"welcome back." It was super cute. We got magic shaker drinks that involved saying things along with the maids. We got "lvl. 1 master" membership cards, and I wrote my name on mine in katakana.

Not pictured: Japanese breakfast pastries from the shinkansen station: I got a sweet bread thing (the milk version; there was the same thing next to it and then the milk version), dad got a super cheese pastry, and we split a bacon and egg pastry. I was really proud of how I was able to read enough to figure out what we wanted, and everything was yummy! Also, we got black sesame and chestnut flavored soft serve on the walk on the way to the Bhuddist temple. There was a lot of great food in Tokyo...we had shabu shabu and sukiyaki and a number of yummy fried things on sticks with different sauces.

Also worth noting is the Japanese breakfast (which we had several times throughout the trip, even when we could have had a more usual breakfast. Adventure, remember?). It involves things like soup (which is sipped, not eaten with a spoon), fish, rice, and tamagoyaki (a sweet egg custard sort of thing). Unfortunately I don't think we ever remembered to take any pictures of it...

We did all that stuff in one week! Hopefully that's enough pictures for you to enjoy visiting Japan vicariously on my wings ;)

Open House is really tiring

Hi there; Birdie here!

So today was LSU's open house. Other than misunderstanding where the specimens were vs. where our table was, the pathology club section ran really smoothly. We had heartworms (of course), a couple of lungs, a cancerous liver, and a kidney with an infarction plus a few things in jars. One of the jars had bezoars, as in the "rock found in a goat's stomach that can cure any poison" in Harry Potter! I really enjoyed working at the table; I quite like explaining things I understand, and I had my little spiel and would ask the kids if they knew what the heart/heartworms were. Well, I enjoyed it for three hours--the fourth hour was a little much. At noon I was off, but my family hadn't made it to BR yet (we were planning to have lunch and then walk the tour together), so I wandered around a bit on my own. They had rescue groups for my 3 favorite dog breeds (Italian greyhounds, whippets, and greyhounds) down one hallway! I didn't get to see any of the large animal stuff or the canine water treadmill, but what I saw was pretty cool. Our decorations in the anatomy lab (which we put up during yesterday's class time--more fun than dissection, but I really don't appreciate the missed time that still counts especially when we're already behind for snow days) looked great. After (a rather disappointing) lunch, I had to get back for my next shift: this time in the respiratory system. We had fresh horse lungs that were inflated by a respirator, fresh goat lungs, preserved human lungs, dried horse and cow and cat lungs...there were a lot of lungs. That was fun too, at least when people came to the back where I was. I talked to one potential vet student who wanted to work with exotics about lab animal medicine. After two hours of that, it was time to clean up (and eat a bit of the king cake Dr. Ven brought us--pecan cream cheese, yum!). It was really tiring, being on my feet all day and dealing with so many people. I think I heard over 8,000 people came to open house today!

The OOS (out of state, on the off chance anyone who follows me isn't from SDN and aware of the lingo) interviews were also today. One guy who was interviewing came by the path table when I was working and correctly identified all the organs (and probably the heartworms; lots of people knew the heartworms since there were like 3 examples throughout the school) and then was like "yay, I feel smart!" Apparently he's from New Jersey, and he talked to the other students at the table since they were both OOS. I hope he gets in. From the little I met him, I rather like him.

We have our immunology final on Tuesday, and a neuroscience exam Friday. The last immunology exam wasn't bad at all--I rocked it, actually. I really should get to studying for these two...don't want to, though, especially after open house. I did actually get to read The Fault in our Stars, and finished it in 2 days. That doesn't really impact my motivation to study, though. I feel like we just had our last neuro test (we basically did. It was this past week).

This week I also had my Banfield interview. It was on Tuesday, for the summer program I'm applying for. I've decided I like phone interviews better than in-person ones--I can be as fidgety as I like and they can't judge me for it (or be "distracted" or whatever). One of my classmates who also interviewed told me some of the behavioral questions they asked, but I still didn't have appropriate answers for 2 of the 3. One was because of the wording of the question, and one was just difficult to come up with. I think I displayed a lot of enthusiasm, though, so maybe they'll like me. Or maybe I'll get the Tulane program and it won't matter, that would be nice, too.

One other thing: WAZEM, the exotics club had a lunch meeting that was open to everyone on Friday. They had a dentist come in who it sounded like was the father of veterinary dentistry, basically. He used to be a human dentist, and he presented hundreds of slides on interesting cases from elephants to tigers to polar bears. He gave one jaguar a gold crown! So just to reinforce: clubs are pretty awesome.

I was more right than I thought I was

Hi there; Birdie here!

So you know how I said last weekend was the longest weekend? I had no idea how right I was. We had the snow day Friday and then I went to the CDC (more on that in the next paragraph), but then we had two more snow days, and didn't start class until 10 (instead of the usual 8) yesterday morning. I spent the first snow day watching the lectures I missed from Monday, which was 6 hours of class. The second day I spent studying for the immunology exam we had as soon as we got back (it went totally fine, btw. I had immuno in undergrad, so I wasn't worried). I did have a bit of fun one of them sliding around on the ice with a friend. I didn't even attempt driving on either of the snow days--laugh all you want, people who live with actual winter on a regular basis, but 1) we don't have salt trucks. Like, in the state, at all. 2) We're not used to it, which means about 95% of people on the road will not have any idea what they're doing, which makes for unsafe conditions. Yeah, no thanks. Although I really will have to go to the grocery store tomorrow... I'm glad we had one of those snow days since I don't know how I'd have gotten through all the lectures without it, but I really wish we hadn't now. It's not as if I wasn't already worried about how I'd finish the anatomy dissection...and now we're going to have class until 5 for about 3 weeks now to make up the time. Which is not much fun, especially when we have 4 hours of neuro in one day.

Anyway, the CDC trip. It was really quite a lot of driving...about 8 hours each way. We had two vans--not the mildly creepy white vans you might think of as a school van. They were really nice, the same sort of minivan my parents have. It wound up being a first years van and an everyone else van. The faculty member who was in charge of the trip, Dr. W, rode in our van for the second half of the trip there, and drove all the way back. When the other van followed us, they kept missing lane changes and taking the wrong exit...it got to be kind of a running thing.

When we first got there, everyone was talking about changing, but I'd only brought business casual clothes (as requested) for the actual event day, not for the reception beforehand. I hadn't been expecting to have time to change (and really we didn't--we got there a bit late--but everyone else was in sweatpants and such and really needed to change). Luckily it wasn't too formal; I put on my nicer shoes, took off the sweatshirt, fixed my hair and changed my jewelry and then my jeans were fine. We checked into the CDC building--we had to show our drivers' licenses--and got our security badges, only I didn't have one. I wasn't the only one; I think there were 3 people in our group who didn't. And I know it was not because I didn't register early enough, especially since I got the T-shirt the next day. We had to turn in the badges at the end anyway, so I don't really care, though. It couldn't go in my scrapbook anyway. ;)

The speakers the first night were mainly about why they wanted us there--about how vets are valuable in public health. One speaker was a DVM/MPH who worked in occupational health, which left at least many of us wondering why exactly she needed a DVM for that (or maybe better phrased as how she was using her DVM in that). We also split into small groups and did an exercise in wordplay involving a penny...it's kind of hard to explain, but it was fun in a riddle-y sort of way, and it made me feel pretty clever when I helped get the answers. There was a reception at the bowling alley in the hotel (yes, that was a thing) with quite good pizza and little cupcakes. We didn't stay for long, though--it had been kind of a long day.

The second day's speakers were more focused on presenting us with the opportunities for DVMs in public health (though, see above: sometimes it was more like opportunities in public health just in general). One was a DVM/PhD who worked on vaccine development and did some procedures on bats in association with bringing in a colony. That was my favorite (I also happen to quite like bats). Some of the stuff they told us about Dr. W had already told us about, but some of it was new. Oh, and we also did a little exercise with passing around wristbands to mimic the spread of a disease. The fluff was a modified rabies virus that was basically a zombie virus, so that was fun. Our hotel room came with a red wristband (initial infected, first to start passing out wristbands), but some people got cute bat beanie babies. I kind of want one. Since I didn't have a badge, I didn't get assigned a tour, but they had an opening in the museum "tour" so I took it. Really it was just an initial presentation and then an opportunity to wander the museum, but I really enjoyed it. All the historical scientific stuff was really cool, and the temporary exhibit was about social justice ("health is a human right"), which I was pretty into. If you get a chance to visit the CDC museum, I recommend it--at least if you're a science/historical science nerd like me.

After my CDC experience, I don't think I want to go into public health, at least not right after graduation/in the ways they focused on. I'd rather not go into regulatory government work that doesn't involve much touching of actual animals, and I'm not really interested in food animal work either. I'm coming to realize that I kind of just want to be a small animal GP; I don't have a special interest in anything, I just want to look at all sorts of diagnostic tests and figure out what's wrong with the pet and help its owners make it better. And I don't see why that can't be okay. (some of that is coming from the LVMA networking event--there was one particularly intimidating veterinarian who was more like a harsh interviewer).

We had our first path club meeting this week, on the first day back after snow days. It was a bit of a mess, to be honest, but I consider it like a bad anatomy exam: I passed, and now it's over and I don't have to worry about it anymore. For the sake of completeness, I'll say that the president wasn't able to eat the food I ordered (which I almost missed ordering, too), only one person signed up for open house, and the presentation was pretty insubstantial (the snow days messed with planning for dates). But we have a treasurer and secretary now, so that's honestly better than I was expecting. I'm not looking forward to spending all day at the path club table at open house, though. Especially since there are 3 other things that want me to work for them, and especially since I really wanted to go to a convention that weekend. Don't try telling me I'll be glad I did open house, either. I could do open house next year; I can't do the convention then.

Today there was a "Friday in the courtyard" event (guess where), which happened to be right after class due to making up snow day time. A good number of first years went (probably because of the 'already there' thing); I stayed for about an hour and had a hot dog. They had free beer, which is great if you like that sort of thing.  Tomorrow Farm Animal Club is putting on a cochon de lait--a pig roast with all sorts of sides and I don't even know what. I already paid the $5 or whatever for a wristband, so I'll be there. Other than that, as much as I would like to go see a movie or read The Fault in Our Stars (I'm getting it from the library; I want to read it before the movie comes out), I'll probably be spending most of the weekend studying for our neuroscience exam. Speaking of which, I should probably at least look at that tonight...