In fact....a salted fish compliments a beer nicely

May 10, 2010

Today was actually a holiday here in Ukraine so we had the day off to get to know our surroundings. Early in the morning we went to the hospital and got a tour from Caroline, a PICU nurse from London, she has been on three trips here before. Dr. D (preferred name :) ) was correct...the hospital is pretty outdated and it seems like it will be a make it work type of environment. There have been no updates to the hospital since the dissolution of the USSR! All of the equipment is sooo old and there is not much of it. The vents are super old and really really big. They reuse alot of equipment!! They told us that we reuse the transducers so try and not to let blood back up in them, haha. We will start surgeries tomorrow and then it is on! We will rotate doing day and night shifts with 3 or 4 other nurses so that there are 2 of us working at all times. We both are working the first night shift tomorrow night. The surgeries planned for tomorrow are most likely a ASD and a TET repair (or BT shunt).

We walked back to the hotel from the hospital. It was a nice little 2 mile jaunt. It was cool to see some of the nieghborhood. It is alot of really old apartment buildings. It looks like they all cram as many apartments in as possible. There were alot of people walking around because of the holiday. We walked to Freedom Square (formerly known as Lenin Square). It is the 2nd largest square in the world! It was pretty cool, alot of open space with some statues. Surrounding it is a really awesome park. There were sooooo many people there and tons of stuff for kids to do. There were pony rides, games, rides, anything you can think of! There was even a man holding a ginormous yellow snake and a little unidentified mammal. It was adorable, a mix between a furby, a chinchilla, with a koala body and gremlin like features. We found a nice little outdoor restaraunt in the park for lunch. There was one waitress there who spoke a little english so she helped us order. We just asked her what the best thing on the menu was and ended up getting some chicken and this cold soup that had like cucumbers, chicken, egg, potatoes and dill. It was all pretty good. After we had eaten and made friends with our waitress we decided to ask her insight on the little dead fish situation. We told her that a man had handed Katie the dead fish on the bus and asked her what that meant. I mean for all we knew Katie could be engaged to this guy or something!! So apparently he didn't want her to eat the guts right away, people here actually like to eat "salted" fish with their beer. So we misunderstood about how it was like buying a beer, actually it was just to eat with a beer. Further more we saw one of these fish in the store later in the afternoon and it costs alot!! It is like 60 gryffindors (our name for the currency here) which is like $8.

After lunch we all just wandered around the city and saw some sights. We found this really cool fountain that went down like a million stairs. We also saw the world's coolest McDonalds, it was HUGE. Scottie tried to get money out of like 17 ATMs with no luck. Apparently 5th 3rd doesn't appreciate us calling ahead of time and asking them if we could use our debit cards in the Ukraine (they lied!!!). After walking around here for awhile you notice different things, like all the women here dress like they are going to the club and they are sooooo tall. There are also some sweet cars here from back in the day. We also learned a little about the language, like the word thank you is something like placebo with a spin on it, and their currency sounds like the gryffindor house in hogwarts. There is always a word you can relate to.

Tonight we all went to the English pub down the street. It was really good food and pretty cheap. Really everything here is sooo much cheaper than at home. Alot of people from the group went to and everyone is super nice. I think we will all get along really well. The last nurse, Michelle, arrived today. She had been traveling from Canada and left there on Saturday, poor girl. Now we are just hanging in the lobby watching nothing but war movies on the tv and listening to Scottie try and call the help desk at Children's so they can help him try and get on his internet in Ukraine. Sounds weird right....yeah it is.