last few days in HK

My time here in HK/China has come to an end and I'll be flying back to Amsterdam in a couple of hours. Last week I finished off my internship working at the soccer 7s, a fairly big soccer event in HK. The clinic I was doing the internship at provided the physio service for the tournament, so we got to massage and strap up plenty of former stars (german, english, french champions, world cup winners, etc) and a couple of future stars (arsenal, aston villa, psv eindhoven, etc). It was good fun working day and a nice way to finish the time here.

last pics of HK, big buddha

And my last few days I was enjoying being in the city, walking around, going to the big buddha and the peak once more.

Now its back to Amsterdam where I have to take a couple of courses before I GRADUATE IN 5 WEEKS TIME. I can hardly believe it, time just flies!!!!!!

M

13 days in China - part 2: Beijing and The Great Wall

After leaving Xi'an I had another overnight train trip and went to Beijing. On the first day there I went to see the Forbidden City and just walked around town for a bit. After that I was simply fed up with seeing tourists (as all the places I had visited so far on my trip were PACKED with them), so I decided to avoid them as much as possible for the rest of my stay. Which was a great decision, cause I was really able to relax and still saw quite a bit of the inner city.

Beijing

The next day I had booked a tour see the Great Wall. I went to one of the parts further away, 3 hours in a small bus, but it was definitely worth it. The tour offered a 4.5h hike on the wall from Jinshanling to Simatai which covered about 10 kilometers. It was great. There were only 2 more groups with buses there and they stuck together, so I could easily manage to walk ahead of them enjoy the peace. You'll see on the pics. Oh, and about the pictures, well I went totally picture-crazy and took 170 pictures of which I still have 111 on my computer. So I really had a hard time selecting the best ones and I still put 17 online, sorry about that (after all, it's just a wall.....).

The Great Wall

My last day in Beijing in started with a free TaiChi lesson in the morning and then took a relaxing bike ride through the city (which lasted all day).
And on Saturday I had to take the train back to Hong Kong, no, not just overnight, the things take more than a day!! 25hours to be exact. But it was quite a bit cheaper than a flight. And I got to read a whole book and sleep quite a bit.
So, that was it about China, at the moment I'm busy with the last part of my internship and in about 10 days I'll be heading back to Amsterdam to finish off my studies (July). More news will be up soon I guess.

M

13 days in China - part 1: Sanxia (3 gorges), Xi'an (terracotta army)

Looking at what I have written so far I started to think about what I still wanted to write here and I came to realise that its simply not possible to describe all the impressions I had. For one there are far too many. Secondly they don't just stay in my mind all the time, but usually just pop up whenever they feel like it, when they get triggered by something. And thirdly, also if I just wrote a few of them (besides that it can be difficult putting it in words), the text would still get too long and most people won't even bother to read it.

Therefore I decided to just give a short account of my journey, with the most important impressions and leave the rest the pictures I took and give extensive comments on those. And if somebody is really interested we can sit down for a tea/hot chocolate/beer/etc (sorry, I don't do coffee) and I'll tell some of the stories. So here we go:

Sanxia, the 3 gorges
I took the overnight train from Guangzhou to Wuhan. As May 1 is the main travel day in China I didn't get a sleeping compartment anymore and had to take a seat (pic). I did sleep for some time, but somehow it wasn't that comfortable (guess why). Then from Wuhan I took a bus to Yichang where I got on the ship. The next two days and nights I spent going up and down the river, seeing some magnificent views.
On the last day we got off the ship where we had started and had the opportunity to look at the 3 gorges dam.
Generally I have to say that I really enjoyed the trip, though I was also a bit disappointed as I didn't realise beforehand how much the water had risen already and how much of the was therefore already lost.

sanxia - the three gorges

Xi'an & terracotta army (Wikipedia about Xi'an)
On the way to Xi'an I stayed in Wuhan for one day where I also saw a friend of mine. During that short day I just had a look at the yellow crane tower and got my things organised. Then I took another overnight train to Xi'an, this time with a sleeping compartment fortunately. After checking in, I just had a look around an then went to see the terracotta army, which is located about 1h from the center. It was quite nice to see, but unfortunately not as impressive as it seem to be on the pictures seen beforehand.
The rest of the day I spent walking around Xi'an and discovering a lot of small alleys, really enjoyable.
The next day I walked up the HuaShan (see next heading). The day after (Tuesday, May 8) I came back in the morning, went into town once more and then finally caught the train to go to Beijing.

Wuhan and Xi'an (terracotta army)

HuaShan - One of the 5 holy mountains
The HuaShan mountain is one of the 5 holy daoist mountains in China. It has 5 peaks and is incredible concerning the way the steps had been carved into the granite stone. It is located about 2 hours from Xi'an. Due to that it is a massive tourist attraction, though most people don't walk up, but rather take the cable car (Doppelmayr, Austrian made) and just walk the last 2h. Still, there also are quite a couple of people that walk up all the way and then stay the night in one of the various hostels to see the sunrise in the morning. Which is exactly what I did. Enjoy the pictures.

HuaShan

M

Second week in China - CongHua (April 22 - May 1)

During my second week in China we (Laura and I, though Laura left after 3 days to go home to Finland) also did a placement. This time we were able to do some hands-on work with the patients which was really interesting. Especially as I hadn't seen some of the types of impairments before, so I learned quite a bit.
The place where the hospital (Hospital homepage in English) is located is actually not the town of CongHua itself, but some smaller village about 15min from CongHua. The place is quite small and lives on tourists, for there are hot springs all over. Somehow though the boom in tourists was overestimated and there a quite a couple of unfinished houses/hotels to be found, along with hotels that close down. Nevertheless new ones still seem to open up, with bigger pools and more luxury.
The hospital itself is located in one of these old hotels, but has been refurbished to the purposes of a hospital.
I really enjoyed the peacefulness and being in the countryside during the 9 days staying there. Although I also worked the weekend I still got around a bit on the bike I borrowed. So just have a look at the pictures, there is an explanation with each one of them.

Placement at the Workers Rehabilitation Hospital

Another story about food has to be told here again. I went for breakfast with Wu Mei at a place on the way to the hospital (as opposed to the staff cantine). She ordered some congee (ricesoup with whatever meat or vegetable in it) for us and asked for the best one. When I started eating I had to battle to get the meat off all these tiny bones, so I asked her what kind of meat it was. At first she didn't want to tell me and just said she didn't know the English word (cheeky :-) ) which made me guess it was snake (as that was similar). After a while she did tell me (before she was afraid I wouldn't try) and I found out that I was eating frog meat for breakfast.... And it was really good :-)

M

First week in china - Guangzhou (April 15 - 22)

As there is so much to write about my whole trip to China I decided to divide it into a few parts. So this is about my first week in Guangzhou (wikipedia about Guangzhou), when I was working in the hospital of the Sun Yat-Sen University. So where to start? Maybe with the reason of me going there.

When preparing for my internship in Hongkong I was asked whether I also would like to see and work in hospitals in the 'real' China, to which I obviously agreed. So I was going to work in China for 3 weeks in 2 different hospitals, 1 week in the Sun Yat-Sen University hospital and 2 weeks in the Guangdong Workers Rehabilitation Hospital close to CongHua (about 1-2 hours Northeast from Guangzhou). 'Unfortunately' the 3rd week was cut short by the May holiday, which is a general public holiday for the whole of China in the first week of May. But more about that time later, for now I'm gonna concentrate on the week I spent in Guangzhou.

Laura (pt student from Finland, also doing an internship at the PolyU) and I traveled to Guangzhou by train (about 2 hours from Hongkong). We stayed in the dormitories with some senior 'rehabilitation sciences' students (In China all the rehabilitation sciences like physiotherapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy, etc are a joint course, not as separate studies like in Europe).

The placement in the hospital was interesting, though unfortunately we were not able to do any hands-on work, mostly it was just observation of the different departments. Nevertheless it was a great experience to see how everything is handled here. Besides many other impressions I found it interesting that TCM (traditional chinese medicine) is just another department in the hospital, just like the orthopedic ward or the intense care unit. Patients get sent there to receive acupuncture, cupping and moxibustion just like they get sent to physiotherapy.
Oh, and one thing which was really 'hard' :-) had to get used to were the long lunch breaks. They usually lasted for about 2.5 hours (during which the whole hospital just switched off its lights and went quiet) and most people went to have a nap during that time.

As we were doing our placement during the day we didn't have that much time looking at the city, but we still managed to do some of it. It was actually quite nice to wander around and discover small allies, walk through the herb markets or just look at the temples... So check out the pictures

In Guangzhou

Oh, one thing we of course didn't miss out on was the food. We had some really nice and sometimes interesting lunches and dinners. Especially the deserts were amazing. And as we tried to order a specific one both of us really liked (but didn't know what it was called or how it was written in Chinese) we got to try a lot of other ones. Funny part was when we just tried to order one by pointing on the menu (as the deserts usually are under the same heading) we ended up ordering beer instead. At least on our last evening we finally got what we wanted (as we had dinner with some friends...)

So that's about it of my first week, more news of the rest of the trip will follow later.

M

back in HK

After 4 weeks filled with amazing experiences I am back in HK to do my last 2 weeks of internship. I started to work at a private clinic in on HK island today, seems like I'll gain quite some experiences there. Anyways, all the stories about my trip to China are still to come, along with the pictures (hopefully soon :-) )

m