Eastern Medicine is NOT the same!!!

Have we got some stories for you!



This week was the Dragon Boat Festival. Shown here is the traditional food eaten during this time. It is glutenous rice wrapped in leaves with something inside. The most common is red dates or sometimes red beans - mine had the dates. It was STICKY and MESSY!



It is a rare thing to have movies shown in English here in the theaters. We lucked out with Iron Man 2 though! It sure was a blast. We smuggled in cherished American candy. For our anniversary, John gave Dana a jar of imported dill pickles (if you really know her, you'd understand). Well, she even smuggled in a couple of these because you certainly can't buy those in the theater! The only time we were reminded where we were was when anytime in the movie Russia was mentioned, it was dubbed over. Why? You ask? No reason! Just roll with the punches!




Food court around 2PM. It seems like every country but America has a nice and long after lunch nap. What's up with that? I say we incorporate one! No matter where people are, from 12:30- 2:00 PM it is nap time. Often we see waitresses crashed out on a table or construction workers sleeping on a stack of bricks!

Now we understand why usually 50% of food court selection is some kind of Asian cuisine. This food court goes on as far as the eye can see, and further! There's Chinese, Korean, and Japanese all together here!

I did it! I finally finished my very first pair of socks! Thanks, Sara, for talking me through some of it! I can't wear them now since it's supposed to break 90 this week. I'll have to wait until around October I suppose.

Not fair, I, Dana, have been growing my hair out since I was born. This girl is still in Elementary school! She's dancing for me - I teach her English on Saturday. The title of the dance is "Horse's Mane Blowing". I wish you could have seen it too!!! Pretty interesting! I'm just glad she didn't expect me to dance in return as they do with their singing.

This one is long, but well worth reading:

One of our friends biffed it on her bike and ended up dislocating her shoulder! Not good in a developing country! When we took her to the hospital, she had to walk to the x-ray room because they had no wheelchairs. Then they wanted to just reduce (pop) it without any pain meds or sedation or all! Ha! Unheard of! She, obviously, wanted some pain meds, so they had to go through the admission process - as her fingers got more and more tingly and numb. Oh! And she had to pay first - no money, no treatment in this country! Finally a stretcher - without side rails - was found and the right department was finally found. And the Anesthesiologist was found to give her the meds - which any nurse in America can do. (Did we mention to be a doctor here they study for 5 years whereas in America it is over 10 years.) They wanted her to change her clothes too - as we're appalled that she still hasn't gotten ANY pain meds. We negotiated with just the lower half of her clothes - seeing that is was impossible and contraindicated to move her shoulder. Over 3 hours later, they finally ended up reducing it... in the operating room!

For the whole unit, I think there was only one nurse - and we thought the nurse-to-patient ratio was tough in the States! However, all she ever did was give meds when called. When my friend's IV bottle (still use glass here) was out, we had to call the nurse. Anyways, patients depend on family or have to hire someone to help them with other things. So, another girl and I (Dana) stayed the night with her. I just couldn't turn my "nurse mode" off all night. I can sleep better than anyone that ever walked the earth (right mom? Michelle?), but that night I sure didn't. The staff was kind enough to provide blankets without the normal deposit. After we inspected them, we asked if they had any clean ones. Her response was, "This is a hospital." Enough said. I could write a novel about this experience!

The good news - they got it back in place and she is slowly getting better!

Which blanket would you pick? Large yellow stain, or smaller dark red stain? Tough choice, huh?

Oh! Another medical story:

Another friend of mine fell (we're really a clumsy bunch) and hit her shin on the ground last month. I took her to get her leg x-ray because it still hurts. Come to find out, she had had a small hair line fracture on her lower leg. They gave her some traditional Eastern medicine to take. Some pills to take (or eat as they say) that when I translated was "Fracture, Bruise Capsules". They also gave her stuff to rub on it and translates to "Bone Setting Water". Needless to say, she didn't take any of it, just taking it easy!

Onto lighter news... last week there was a World Veterans Ping Pong Tournament near our house. There were people from all over the world there! It was nice not being the only foreigners in town for once!

All contestants were age 40 and older. The above player is from Japan - she is standing on her feet! Isn't she the cutest?

Below are two more women from Japan warming up. They were actually a team. They had doubles and singles championships. To our hearts dismay, they didn't win, but they were adorable! The oldest player was over 100 years old from Australia!

For the singles championship, we sat among the Danish crowd, and they were WILD!!! The 40-50 year old men's championship had one of their players from Denmark playing against Germany. (Which we learned that Germany is really good at ping pong. Up there with Japan and China!) They got us cheering for their player, doing the wave, and even singing their National anthem! Their player lost the first 2 games (was to 11, best 3 out of 5). He came back and won the 3rd and 4th! They were neck-in-neck for the championship game, but our guy, Alan Bentsen pulled through! We, I mean, they won!!!