it's like running

Running hurt at first. Sometimes during, always after. Occasionally, even before - anticipatory pain.

MEPN is like that.

I haven't used my brain like this in a while. Even in pre-requisites, there was room to breathe. Even working full-time and taking pre-reqs full-time wasn't like this.

I am truly, truly brain-dead.

I try to read and words swim on the page in front of me. I try to take notes - look up and define terms, summarize what I learned today - and I just can't do it.

Does this mean I am broken and can't do it? Probably not. More likely, I need to train. Really, really efficiently.

They took it easy on us this week. Shorter days, classes that were more of an overview or orientation as opposed to lecture and work, a full day off from clinicals tomorrow. I get to saunter over to campus at a luxuriously late 9:15 for some team building. This week has been easy and I am beat. I semi-dread next week, with its normal crazy pace, actual assignments due, patient care beginning to move into my hands.

I am in such pain from the thinking, the synthesizing of information, the reading, the novelty. And what does a runner do when she is in pain? She takes a rest day. Rest up, repair damaged tissues, prepare for further damage. Except instead of delayed-onset muscle soreness (DOMS), I suppose I am having delayed/immediate-onset brain soreness (D/IOBS - not a real term at all, except on my blog). Nonetheless, I expect that resting up now instead of cramming in more info is going to be helpful. Leave me some brain to cram tomorrow.

That is how I justify my wine tonight. It is also how I concluded that I have permission to be totally worthless every single Friday night after clinicals. I will be eating take-out, drinking booze, and either zoning out alone with a movie or hanging out with other MEPN folks to debrief (in a HIPAA-compliant fashion, of course) and de-stress.

MEPN is crazy. I was so cocky, thinking I was so ready for it, and I was wrong, wrong, wrong. I am quite overwhelmed and a little behind. Already. On day 4.

It's going to get better, I'm sure. I will keep running and wine-ing and whining and it will all be OK.

first day

I rather liked it. I think I'll go back for more tomorrow.

They are being kind to us the first week - breaking us in easy. Our skills lab day actually starts at 9:15 instead of 8 - either an extra hour of sleep or studying, depending on what my body tells me tomorrow. Our first day of clinicals will begin at 8 instead of 7, though I think it'll make my commute a tiny bit worse to arrive then - I'll probably still head down early to beat traffic. We get Friday off from clinicals to do some team building thingy, which I would normally run far, far away from, but I think it'd be lovely to get to know people better.

Here we go, eh?

first official day tomorrow!

OMG.

orientation tomorrow!!

I had a brief UCSF moment today, just to get my ID badge and to be fitted for a TB mask. Tomorrow is orientation allllll day long. I don't know what half the day entails as we have not yet been given a full, detailed schedule. I assume it will be useful stuff. For an institution that loves forms, signage, checklists and the like, this is a bit disappointing.

how the trip ended

If you watch American news, you've probably seen the sinkhole. Yeah. Things went haywire at the end of my trip. I've been back for a few days, but they've been spent sleeping and seeing people whom I feared I would never see again. So that's a bit dramatic, but getting out of Guatemala was such an ordeal, thanks to the natural disaster action in late May.

Thursday, May 27: I am obliviously having my last dinner in Xela, enjoying drinks with new friends and thinking about how I will be on an Antigua-bound bus the next day. Nobody is watching the news, so we are all oblivious to the fact that the Pacaya Volcano has just had a pretty huge explosion. Planes heading in and out of Guatemala City are halted as of 7:30 that night.

Friday, May 28: I head out, and people at school let me know it may be harder to get into Antigua because of all this. My philosophy on this trip has become to head in your eventual direction, even if you get stuck in route, because at least you will be closer to your eventual destination. We manage to make it to Antigua, and notice it's raining. A lot.

Saturday, May 29: It's raining so much because this is tropical storm Agatha. Streets in Antigua are flooded up to my knees. That's a substantial improvement over Xela, which is so flooded that people are losing their homes. We lose electricity. I am obviously not going to the airport tomorrow. Freak out and call my airline. The next best scenario involves flying out of El Salvador...Tuesday. I cry. I take the change of flights. I have been ready to go home and am really upset.

Sunday, May 30: Rain has stopped. In fact, it's kind of beautiful today. We sit in Internet cafes, sipping daiquiris, Skype-ing folks back home about how badass we are for surviving all these insane natural disasters.

Monday, May 31: Get on a bus to El Salvador. See Guatemala City on our way, still shoveling tons of volcanic ash out of the way. Encounter several detours on the way because of rock and mudslides. Make it to El Salvador just fine. Collapse in our hotel room all day.

Tuesday, June 1: Get to the airport 4+ hour prior to our flights and barely make it through check-in and security. It was insane. Everyone who had flights out of Guatemala since Thursday night was there. Just insane. Make it home around midnight. Notice my GI tract doesn't feel so hot.

Wednesday, June 2: Home. With amoebic dysentary. Start my Flagyl and feel sorry for myself. I can't even have a cocktail to celebrate being home.

******

Overall verdict on the trip? I'm glad I did it. It was useful, usually. My Spanish is vastly better. I got to see a country I'd never been to before, and it was beautiful. I met lovely people. I'd do it again with my current knowledge: don't do homestay, make sure there are not too many people in the program when I go, make it a bit shorter but more focused overall. Travel to the parts of the country I missed this time (Livingston, Flores, Coban).

But right now, I am so happy to be home that I can barely handle it. Now I can return to chattering about school. Today, however, is a rare sunny day. It is made for a leisurely stroll to the library and the farmers' market, then reading the paper while lounging in the sun.

last weekend at Lago Atitlan

Lago Atitlan is, by far, one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen. Unreal. It reminds me a lot of Tahoe, only with steeper mountains and totally different character.

We got a private shuttle leaving from Xela at 7 a.m. and had a motion-sickness-inducing ride through the mountains down to Atitlan. We arrived in San Pedro around 10 a.m. to our obscenely beautiful, relatively new hotel right by the Santiago dock. We divided up our party of 6 between 2 rooms and headed out to check out what San Pedro has to offer.

The answer to that quandry is: lots of expatriates who own businesses in the town. Pretty much every sign we saw was in English. Now, that's not, by itself, a bad thing. It IS, however, an impediment to the purpose of my trip; i.e., learning more Spanish.

It was just before noon when we saw a sign advertising BBQ and bocce at a place called ¨La Piscina.¨ Uh, really?? I could be eating a BURGER and playing BOCCE? Oh, so there.

Thus began and ended my first day in San Pedro. Well, it wasn't entirely over after that, but the afternoon sure was shot. La Piscina serves a very deadly concoction that they swear is just sangria but is actually the tastiest and most dangerous thing I have ever consumed. I lost terribly at bocce. I had a lot of sangria and a tasty burger as well. My friends and I went back to our hotel to nap before dinner. An excellent day overall.

Next morning I was supposed to hike volcano San Pedro with some friends, but I couldn't make the 4:30 a.m. wakeup call, so I continued sleeping instead. Woke up a couple hours later and had brunch with other non-hikers. We continued wandering around town, and it got a bit too hot out for that activity to remain comfortable. We went back to the hotel to drink white wine and await the arrival of our hiker friends.

Their hike only took 4 or 5 hours. I wish I had gone, but I was also informed that it was far more brutal than my demanding morning of brunch, wine, and a token amount of studying. We all chatted on the patio of the hotel. Half of our crew left to get a chicken bus back to Xela. Then one of the hikers went down to our room to shower, and found out her bag (containing all her money, debit card, and passport) had just been stolen from our hotel room.

Oh fuck.

What do you do when this happens?

1. Freak out if you were the one robbed; get mega-calm if you are her friend who will have to help her navigate the next steps.
2. Go to internet cafe. Cancel all cards. Research how to get your passport for your flight that leaves in less than 48 hours.
3. Figure out how to get to your country's embassy ASAP in the morning. This involves an early trip as well as your friends spotting you money for your private shuttle that gets you to the embassy during its ridiculous hours.
4. Go to the police - the special tourism police, in our case. They will write up a report that you can take to the embassy to aid in getting your passport. They initially seem very helpful. Then they will call the owner of the hotel where you are staying, and he will demand an inspection (and will also pay off the cops to come do this).
5. Deal with the police when they show up at your hotel unnanounced. Go back to police station another time to amend police report. Politely decline when police say 'you know, we could help you,' as in, if you are willing to pay.
   
6. Drink heavily upon return.
7. Sleep as much as possible to deal with shit the next day.

My friends and I took a boat from San Pedro to Panajachel, another beautiful town that is a bit bittersweet for me now. The friend who was robbed got on a shuttle to the capitol immediately and managed to arrive at the embassy an hour before it closed. They were nice enough to stay open 1 hour later until her emergency passport was ready. My other friend and I attempted to get on a shuttle back to Xela, and found out there was a huge protest over energy prices blocking the highway in that direction.

Uh.

So we had to stay in Panajachel until 4 p.m. We sat in a cafe all day, eating, drinking, studying, and appreciating the fact we two were the ones stuck and not our friend who needed to make it to the embassy.

4 p.m. - we go to catch our shuttle. All is well for about half an hour, when we discover that there has been a ROCK SLIDE on the highway. We spend the next 2 hours in a restaurant along the highway (and yes, it is singular 'highway' because there really is only one that can take us where we need to go). Depart from here around 6:30. Change shuttles 3 times over the next 2-ish hours. Arrive back in Xela around 9 p.m. We checked out of our hotel at 8 a.m.

Oh god, what a weekend.

*****

One piece of news that alleviates my homesickness: it has apparently been a very cold, wet May in San Francisco. I spent last weekend at a tropical Central American lake. Yeah.

what. a. weekend.

This weekend was ridiculous. Mostly in not-good ways. I need a while to package it up and post it for you. The full report will entail:

• a description of a bocce tournament at the best ex-pat pool bar in San Pedro, Guatemala;
• instructions on how to get an emergency passport if yours (not mine in this case, but a friend's) is stolen within 48 hours of you needing to leave the country;
• tips for dealing with corrupt Guatemalan policemen;
• how to maintain your sanity when a protest and then a rockslide prevent you from returning home for 12 hours.

Ridiculous weekend. That's what I've got to say.

*****

I had an email this morning letting me know that training for the SF Half Marathon begins today. That's both good and bad: bad, because I cannot start training now. No matter what you hear, running in Xela is really effing hard unless you go to the track. I don't want to run in circles. And good, because that means I am only 2 weeks behind in training. This may not end up being my fastest race, but I will certainly be able to finish it.

Overall, that reminder made me REALLY REALLY homesick and sad. I only have 10 more days in Xela, and 12 more in Guatemala. That's not very long to enjoy a country I've never seen before. Then again, this weekend certainly soured my enjoyment up to this point and made me a lot more vigilant about safety.