a revelation...and sports!

so im sitting here listening to stevie ray vaughn, sipping on windhoek lager, waiting for someone to come over for dinner.

i've been doing a lot of cooking lately...and i've found out i'm not that bad at it actually. i made the BEST steak ever a few nights ago...omnomnomnom

sometimes i wonder how i enjoy music like stevie ray vaughn, between the buried & me, opeth, dream theater, and ne-yo all at once. anyway.

i went on a sunset cruise the other day...which is misleading cuz it's not a cruise ship but a medium-sized sailboat. i havent' been on very many boats so it was really nice. we sailed the cape as the sun went down and the breeze goin by...even saw some baby seals resting on the buoys in the ocean. i thought i caught a glimpse of robbins island as well, which is where nelson mandela was imprisoned for 27 years.

i definitely wanna visit there if time(and money allows).

upcoming planned activities...i'm going to go shark cage-diving very soon :]!!!!!!
it's expensive--1150R or so, which is like oh...idk. divide by approximately 7, but it's going to be totally worth it.

also planning a trip to namibia (which is directly north and west of south africa) for some safaris and sandboarding. but this could be very pricey as well.

i've realized i need more moneyyyyyy so i can do everything this amazing place has to offer in the short time i'm here. i've only been here a little over a week but already i feel like as if i've been here for a month. i've come to known the roads and directions quite well.

incidentally, my address is:
37 roeland st #912
cape town, 8001, south africa

so if you want to send me mail that's cool it'd make me a happy little asian :]

today is friday so i did ward rounds w/ the doctors at the hospital. you know those war pictures of malnourished people? or the national geographic covers where people are so sick they're pretty much nothing but a living skeleton.
it was shocking to see patients in this state. i've been in hospitals before and even in the dominican republic's most poverty-ridden areas...but i was still unprepared for what i saw today.

the wards would smell like urine when we walked in and the patients would be in their beds curled up, hooked up to several diffferent IV fluids...and you have to remember nothing looks new or fancy. the entire hospital is very run-down, decrepid and silent-hill esque. i saw firsthand what HIV can do to people. of course, HIV itself doesn't cause too many symptoms in and of itself, but tuberculosis (TB) is the 2nd most problematic epidemic here and almost 75% of patients have it.

i saw a severe case of athlete's foot as well. not the kind in the states where there's a very thin white layer of fungus b/w the toes...but this guy literally had like vesicles that looked like they were about to burst and sporulate everything...gross. but that was the least of his problems.

another woman had jaundice. i've never actually seen it. jaundice is yellowing of the skin and eyes due to increased concentrations of bilirubin in the blood. but i looked into her eyes and it was almost scary...pteryglia and cataracts had completely clouded her iris so it looked like one of those creepy horror movie ghosts or something and then the whites of her eyes were well...a faint yellow. it was really scary.

looking at the patients, you would never guess that any of them would ever get better and be able to lead normal lives. but a small few of them do get better enough to the point where they're able to return to their previous lives. i'm pretty sure i even saw a corpse wheeled by me at some point today.
off topic, i saw the south african SWAT team when i was leaving the hospital...random. kinda intimidating too. they just stared at me and watched me leave.

now i'm an ass. not as big an ass as james harrell. but i'm still an ass. even so, i have always thought i wanted to be a doctor.
i wasn't completely sure if i wanted to go to medical school and spend the rest of my career dealing with and helping sick people.
but as of right now, this day, i'm certain this is what i want to do. yes the financial aspect of it is very appealing, but i remember standing in that piss-smelling ward as the doctors surrounded a woman who was only 40 and weighed in at less than 60 pounds as the doctors tried to figure out what to do, and feeling nothing but admiration for these doctors who were getting paid a pittance to deal with patients suffering from one of the most impossibly difficult and frustrating diseases. while i may not get to work with AIDS patients, i want to be in that position one day.

we'll see if grad school changes my mind...haha

OH!!! and i found my camera :] some guy picked it up at the wine festival...so i called the wine estate, and they gave me his # and i went to pick it up from him a few days later. he lives in table view, which is like 20-30km outside of cape town...but totally worth it. there are still some decent people left in this world

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so i'm so proud to live in pittsburgh. first the steelers win the superbowl to become the franchise w/ the most superbowl wins...and then in the same year, the penguins take the stanley cup, becoming only the 3rd or 4th team i think to win game 7 against a better team in an away game. that's impressive.

granted, at the exact time of writing this, there is still 17:24 left in the 3rd period, but it's safe to say the pens have this one with the way they're playing. the game aired at 2am here but me and some other guys stayed up late after hitting the bars and clubs and found a live internet stream to watch game 7. unfortunately, the connection was shitty and the stream would interrupt every 5 seconds...everyone here is a wings fan...me and nina (the girl from chatham) are pretty much the only pens fans i know of here. and all the wings fans were talking shit about how no one wins a game 7 away against DETROIT. winning is so much better after everyone has given you complete shit about it.

2/3 of pittsburgh's professional sports have taken the national title (yes the pirates suck ass). i can only conclude that pittsburgh is the best sports city right now :] fuck boston, fuck philly and fuck LA, even though they will win the NBA finals :(

this gets me so pumped up for this upcoming NFL season where the steelers will have one of the easiest schedules...and the defensive roster remains largely the same. the steelers have a legitimate chance to reach the superbowl again if they can get past the patriots, which i think they can.

i love pittsburgh. long live the steel city <3