Highlands and Islands (2)

The bus ride revealed the true sense of isolation that typefies the Outer Hebrides: there's a bleakness of the type that I've never seen before. Something with a different quality to it: not the vast nothingness of the Nullabor Plain, nor the alpine tundra of the mountains of Sichuan. A few houses dotted the almost lunar landscape. Howling winds blew. When I got to the stones, it was so windy that it was virtually impossible to take any pictures. There was a bus load of tourists though, and they somehow managed to take away some of the sense of isolation and bleakness.

I had another half hour to kill before the next bus came and so I whiled away my time at the lovely cafe attached to the visitor centre - they made delicious fruit scones. The Outer Hebrides is a good place to visit when you have your own car; otherwise you're at the mercy of the somewhat unreliable and skeletal bus service. While it is possible to tour the islands by public transport, you lose all your flexibility.

My next stop was the Butt of Lewis at the top of the ocean where there was a lovely beach, and, my first glimpse of the Atlantic Ocean. Gigantic waves pounded the golden sand, and woe to the sod who decides to have a swim! Not surprisingly, two people drowned around here this very weekend.

I spent some of that night at a pub on the main street of Stornoway. Every night has a different theme for the islanders - Thursday night was a night where anyone can perform their music - a true free for all. I chatted for a bit with a lady about my age who was working in Aberdeen at a school for children with autism and mentioned I had once written a mini-thesis on autism. She was taking a holiday by herself here for a week. I thought that these islands must be favourite places for people with autism: they're so lonely and utterly isolating.

When I woke up the next morning, it was raining. The rain got heavier and heavier. The part of the island called Harris is usually more sheltered than Lewis (the top half) but when I got to Tarbert, the main town of Harris (which was little more than a tourist information centre and a ferry terminal) it was bucketing down cats and dogs. Here I was meant to catch the ferry to Uig on the Isle of Skye. There was absolutely nothing to do except wait at the ferry terminal. After a very bumpy ride on the ferry, I got to Uig only to find that the bus to Portree had left before any of the ferry passengers could catch it! So in the pouring rain, six of us caught a taxi - cheaper than the bus fare, but my bus fare was covered by my travel pass. It continued to be soggy.

The Highlands and Islands

I got myself a Freedom of Scotland Pass and took a few days off work to travel around the wilder areas of Scotland, i.e. the Highlands and Islands. These were well-known places I'd heard of even before planning my trip. And the kind of places I thought of would be interesting.

First off I went to the northernmost corner of Britain. This involved a wonderful train ride from Inverness to Wick which is way up north. (Check it out on a map!) The scenery was brilliant, you have dramatic coastline, sheep pastures (baa!) as well as oh, so bleak and barren wastelands, especially at the northern end. For much of the trip, I found myself struggling to stay awake. There is something somnogenic about the quiet rumbling of a train.

Anyway, about lunchtime I got to the destination of Wick, which is a pretty little town, if a little depressing. It has the usual shopping mall although cars were driving on it anyway. There really wasn't much to do here, except take a couple of photos as a souvenir. I did so and the next thing I did was to hop on a bus to John O'Groat's - the northeasternmost corner of Great Britain. (This was included in my travel pass.)

JOG - what a dump! This has got to be the most depressing place I've ever been to, even though the sun shined. About the best thing that can be said about the place is the view to the Orkney Islands for which I didn't even have time to get to. It basically consisted of a jumble of shoddy souvenir shops selling faux kilts and shortbread that was probably baked in a worker-exploiting factory near Shanghai. Humbug! From there I proceeded to Thurso, Britain's northernmost town, another bleak and dingy place from where I caught the train back to Inverness. The highlight of the day was bumping into a group of beautiful girls who had fundraised their way on bikes from Land's End in Cornwall (the other end of the country where there is a place just as tasteless) for the last month and a half. Even they mentioned they didn't like John O'Groats. Well, I was warned!

Next stop was the Outer Hebrides - called Ebudae by the Latins. Enya mentions them a lot in her songs. This involves a boat ride from Ullapool, a lovely resort town in itself. The boat I went on was huge, probably as big as the Spirit of Tasmania. It was full of islanders who had spent some of the summer holidays on the mainland returning to their beloved abode. The scenery on this boat ride was fantastic, it would of even been better had it not been so windy and not rained for a while.

After three hours, the boat finally got to Stornoway, the largest town in the Outer Hebrides, located on the isle of Lewis. I had been told before that Stornoway was yet another one of those characterless towns noted for nothing else but dinginess and depression, yet this time I couldn't be further from the truth. The streets were packed with people, both from the islands and holidaymakers. Cafes and pubs lined the streets giving an atmosphere reminiscent of a seaside resort in Victoria, like Anglesea or Apollo Bay. I checked into a ramshackle hostel I had pre-booked earlier, to find it occupied with travellers around Europe.

The other thing I noticed about Stornoway was that all the streets were in Gaelic with English in small print beneath. Gaelic (pronounced gallic) is a Celtic language spoken by perhaps half of the Islander population. In recent years there has been a concerted move to preserve it, especially by the new SNP (Scottish National Party) led Scottish Government. The island is also well known for strict observance to the Sabbath and conservative religious values, especially the older residents. EVERYTHING shuts down on Sunday, if you have no food in the fridge, you will simply starve. Lucky I arrived on a weekday.

I hopped on a bus to the Callanish Standing Stones - an ancient stone circle originally thought to be used as a burial ground for Stone Age islanders.

Mini-Update; the Soldiers' Video

I'm currently back in Glasgow after a weekend (that's since Thursday) in the Outer Hebrides and Skye. More details later.

I would like to take this opportunity though to show my personal condemnation at the Howard Government's non-response to videos of Australian soldiers dressed in Ku Klux Klan outfits and binge-drinking. It sends an extremely negative and abhorrent message to the world about our country, although it was hardly surprising, considering Howard's refusal to denounce Pauline Hanson and her One Nation Party at their peak in the late 1990s.

If Howard can equate voting for the Democrats in the US as giving comfort to terrorists and fail to criticize this kind of behaviour from our own armed forces it just shows how much of a narrow-minded, outdated and racially prejudiced person he actually is. And attempting to use this issue to win him another election! Howard MUST be defeated for the sake of Australia's international reputation, and I look forward to joining the fray when I return in early October. I highly doubt that the election will be held before then given recent opinion polling.

Tall Tented T waves

Sometimes you never remember things until you see them and they are forever etched in your mind.

We had a young man (40s) come in today with DKA (diabetic ketoacidosis). He had very poorly controlled Type I diabetes and was on dialysis - with just about every complication in the book. He had ischaemic chest pain and there were no beds for him in Renal so he wound up here at CCU.

Anyway... on admission his glucose was 72!!!! and his Potassium was 8!!!! ECG showed TALL, TENTED T WAVES, and WIDENED QRS COMPLEXES. Our consultant said he was very lucky to survive - this was a textbook ECG that portended DEATH!!! He said he hoped we would never see an ECG like that ever again in our lives.

This patient is now BETTER.

My luckless run with drips continues though...... I wonder what will happen to me when I have to do them for my living (which is soon).

Glasgow (updated!)

I spent this weekend in the wackily wonderful metropolis of GLASGOW which is Scotland's largest city. It is also the namesake of the late Professor Eric Glasgow, one of my old anatomy professors of Monash, even though he was from Belfast.

Glasgow is a very old city; in many ways, it resembles a cross between Sydney and Melbourne, although it is much wetter than both. That being said, it was a pretty good weekend as far as the weather went, with only a few showers on both days. I didn't have time to go around the whole city but with the federal election coming I tailored my trip to a somewhat sociopolitical bent.

The Merchant District is a lot like Fitzroy, although somewhat more cosmopolitan. It is here that the Trades Hall is located, a venerable old building, not nearly as big as the one on Lygon Street Carlton, and smack in the middle of Glasgow's queer ghetto. Further east, I dropped into St. Mungo's Museum of Life and Religious Art. This museum was created by leaders of the various religions in Glasgow and was aimed to educate people about the similarities and differences of each of them, through an exhibit about the main principles of each religion and how they treat certain tenets of life, such as birth, marriage, war, peace and death. This was also facilitated by an art exhibition of artefacts from each of the main religions. Outside the museum, there's Britain's only permanent Zen garden, with fifteen stones, some supposedly depicting certain animals, such as a turtle for long life, but the ambiguity is its real purpose.

Directly opposite St Mungo's Museum is the Glasgow Cathedral which is centuries ancient but I didn't have time to have a peek inside. A short walk from here leads you to the Bridge of Sighs across Wishart Street to the Glasgow Necropolis where many of Glasgow's big wigs are buried in elaborate, though crumbling, graves.

A short walk from here is the East End of town. For many decades this was considered one of the most unhealthy and deprived areas of urban Europe. Yet it was the reality of life for the great part of the Glaswegian population. Most people lived in tenements, referring to the stories above shopfronts; they were usually grossly overcrowded and unsanitary. Here were all sorts of shops selling ersatz and dodgy goods like a thousand $2-shops. On the weekend, there's the Barras, Glasgow's famous flea market and one of the largest in Europe; it looked like a watered down version of our own Queen Vic Market, selling just about every dubious-quality product you can think of. For many years, before it became a tourist attraction, it was the happy hunting ground for many less well-off families.

This was all located in the "Gallowgate", which is exactly what it means. Not far from here is Glasgow Green, where people sentenced to death were hanged. At one point, there were over 200 capital offences, most of them relating to theft of personal property. I managed to be in this park on the weekend of the Glasgow Show (Fair), a beer-and-pretzels hotchpotch of children's shows and activities and low-level impersonations of Abba and Elvis Presley. This is a remnant of the Glasgow Fair which for nearly a thousand years entertained the poorest citizens of Glasgow for two weeks each summer.

Here in Glasgow Green was the People's Palace, a museum of Glasgow's social history. There were exhibits of how rich and poor people spent their summer holidays, and on everyday life in the tenements - the crowded housing that was the domain of most people in the city. Sanitation was appalling and general quality of life poor - and predictably, crime came with it. There is also a huge portrait of Jimmy Reid, one of the twentieth century's great trade union leaders, together with an introduction to the trade union movement and Margaret Thatcher's Poll Tax which a third of Glaswegians refused to pay. (The poll tax replaced council rates, but was fixed per person rather than based on the value of the property, making it an extremely regressive tax.) Overall, I found the People's Palace somewhat simplstic, but it's still definitely a place to bring your kids if they ever visit Scotland.

On Saturday night I slept in one of the worst hostels I've ever been to. The Euro Hostel is smack in the middle of town, but it's in a very seedy district. Its incorporated bar, Osmosis, was packed with obnoxious football fans who had just seen Celtic beat Chelsea. The hostel itself was not the cleanest and absolutely shorn of personality. I got about two hours of sleep the whole night.

The next day I spent at New Lanark which is about an hour to the south, not far from the English border. New Lanark was an industrial community that revolved around cotton mills. It is notable because the mill owner, Robert Owen (1771-1858) was one of the few enlightened businesspeople who believed in humanity and co-operation between employers and employees. He set up the first child care centre for employees, allowed children to attend school until the age of 10 (and banned corporal punishment), and introduced a sickness fund (deductions from wages) so that all workers would receive free health care if the need arose. Amazingly, production did not fall under these conditions more humane than at other sites, and a healthy profit was maintained. However, Owen was mocked by his fellow mill owners and they did not follow his lead. Eventually, Owen founded two more of these co-operative colonies in the US before returning to Britain as one of the founding fathers of the Trade Union Movement. A statue of Owen stands in the working-class district of Manchester. His son continued his father's work in the US and went on to become a notable Congressman of the Left faction of the Democratic Party.

New Lanark is also the home of a beautiful waterfall and it is a pleasant stroll there from the township on a warm summer's day. It reminded me of home. In my birth country, cotton mills were also commonplace. Under the Chiang Kai-shek Government cotton mill workers in Shanghai had to work 16 hours a day under appalling conditions, many were underage, they were universally underfed, and many were not even paid their wages, rather, they were on a contract with their families and employers and they had to pay off a "job-arrangement" debt first which took three or four years. Only after this disastrous regime was overthrown in 1949 that these women were granted a modicum of dignity in their job conditions. As for my adopted home, you don't have to look further than WorkChoices - NoChoices or BendOver would be a better name for it.

A Weekend in the Highlands

I spent the last weekend just gone trudging in the Highlands, hoping to put my mind away from agonising over job placements that would be released on Monday.

After work on Friday I jumped on a train to Inverness, capital of the Highlands. Outside the train station, a bunch of people dressed up as wizards and witches were standing outside the shopping centre waiting for the bookshop to open at midnight for the release of the last Harry Potter book - Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. It was getting late, and I had had a long day, so I checked into Inverness' somewhat functional youth hostel (as I found, somewhat abundant in OLD clientele) and went to bed. I dreamed that I had been placed at a certain Hospital (which I won't name) - about as happy as Harry Potter being sorted into Slytherin.

The day dawned overcast and drizzly, as has just about every day since the first day I've been here. I caught the early bus to Drumnadrochit, which is the main tourist centre on the shores of Loch Ness. Just about everything possible was made to squeeze every tourist dollar out of the myth of the Loch Ness Monster, which of course only superstitious fools would believe existed.

After lunch I went to Fort William and jumped on the train to Mallaig. This is considered one of Europe's most scenic train journeys and it didn't disappoint. The line was dotted with mountains, glens, lochs, islands, and most famously the Glenfinnan viaduct, which was part of a backdrop in the Harry Potter films.

I spent Saturday evening at the Ben Nevis bar which was attached to an outdoorsy hiking shop and which was meant to attract a mountaineering clientele, but all I found were some chatty ordinary couch potato locals which was nice enough. I ordered myself a very unhealthy dinner but then all dinners here in Scotland are very unhealthy. The rest of the night, half-drunk, I crushed a bunch of ESL Germans at the game of Taboo. That's what I like about having a four-digit IQ, baby!

On Sunday I went to Glencoe. It continued to rain and rain and rain. All weekend there was not a minute of sunshine. A few brave souls actually attempted to climb Ben Nevis, Britain's highest peak, that morning. At Glencoe there is a memorial to the 38 people massacred in 1692 during a rebellion against the Governments in Edinburgh and London who were loyal to King William and who regarded the Highland residents as savages. I wonder when will Australia ever build a proper memorial to the half a million indigenous people who were eliminated at a stroke when the tall ships arrived nearly a century after the atrocities of Glencoe.

As for my job placement, I will be working at Southern Health next year (based at Monash Medical Centre in Clayton). As such, it will mean taking Citylink every day. But in the grand scheme of things, I couldn't expect to be more pleased.

Away this weekend

I am going to Loch Ness and Glencoe this weekend. Will be back on Monday, hopefully pleased about my job placement for '08.

A weekend in LONDON

Last weekend, I went to LONDON by train. As most of you probably know, London is one of the biggest cities on earth. However, when I first arrived in this great European megalopolis, I was somewhat underwhelmed. I thought of it as a more refined, more comprehensive version of Sydney. The air was clean and it wasn't crowded, albeit it being a Sunday morning. It didn't give any hint of the absolute rumble-and-mumble and wall-to-wall saturation that typefies cities like Shanghai and Hong Kong.

I first passed by London when I got to the UK by air. It was actually sunny and warm (quite un-Londonlike) and I had a morning to kill after my rendevous with my work supervisor fell through. After becoming LOST (a rare thing for me with a map, as I am usually very good with directions), I eventually stumbled into the British Museum. This behemoth of a building was too big to explore by myself so I paid 8 quid (British slang for "pound") for a highlights tour.

Things that I saw here included the Rosetta Stone which enabled Egyptian hieroglyphics to be translated for the first time - an object that was discovered to have identical paragraphs in three languages, including the then unintelligble Hieroglyphic and the intelligible Greek. There were the huge statues of these giant animals that guarded the palace of Sargon of Assyria (now Iraq). About half a dozen Egyptian mummies were also on display, together with Britain's own mummy, the Lindow Man, naturally preserved in a peat bog after dying a victim of ritual human sacrifice. I had first heard of the Lindow Man during a Year 8 History Class at University High's Task Force, where Mr Andreou taught history from a different perspective - not learning dates, but researching evidence and making hypotheses. The Lindow Man and the Tollund Man in Scandinavia was among these. Nearby was another memory from my history lessons - exhibits from the Sutton Hoo burial site which included fragments of a huge Saxon ship.

The museum features many myriad of items that the British obtained, no, STOLE from just about every nook and cranny of the wretched globe. This includes huge numbers of porcelain artefacts obtained in my own mother country after we shamefully lost the Opium War, ordered by a young Queen Victoria under the auspices of Lord Melbourne in the 1840s. The Greek Government have been sniping at the British Museum for years to get their treasures returned. The big wigs of Beijing have a moral obligation to do the same.

Last Saturday I visited the Tower of London, an absolute ripoff at 16.50 quid. I expected it to be a huge site but it wasn't. It did bring back more memories of history lessons when I saw where Richard III allegedly murdered his nephews - we bickered for weeks on whether there was enough evidence to implicate either him or certain other royals. There was also the collection of the Crown Jewels - an appalling waste of taxpayers' money that could be better off being sold to better the public services of the Commonwealth's poorer members or installing air conditioning in the Tube. Westminster Abbey was an interesting place - it was basically one big graveyard for monarchs and mortals who made a great contribution to British society. Afterwards, I walked by Buckingham Palace, which is also a huge waste of money to maintain (the monarchs of mainland Europe have to make do with much more modest environments).

On Sunday, I went to the Royal Greenwich Observatory, me having always been interested in astronomy. This was where the prime meridian of zero longitude separated the world into east and west. Of course, unlike North and South Poles which are actual pre-ordained locations, this line of longitude is an arbitrary line. What divine right had England to claim this line that the wold must use as a standard? Personally, the standard meridian should be measured from the Purple Mountain Observatory in Nanjing.

Later on, I went to the Science Museum, where James Watt's steam engine was on display. I also enjoyed the Mathematics exhibit which had cuisenaire rods, the ones that were used to teach numbers when I was at primary school (this was before most of my friends were born). There was a display of a book called "Matriculation Mathematics for Girls", an atrocially sexist text which was almost entirely based on the arithmetic of cooking and shopping that dated from as recently as the late sixties. With the obligatory collection of abaci, no doubt stolen from my own beloved motherland.

My favourite bit though had to be the med section. This occupied one and a half floors. It showed the sheer primitiveness of medicine that prevailed in the Western World for millenia and the quackery that plagued the medical and surgical industry before the huge advances taken in the last century. Did you know that in WWII, penicillin was an Allied secret used as an advantage against the Germans, so that it was not available to British civilians and hence many thousands of lives were thus lost? To its credit, the museum also showed many traditional Chinese herbs that are still used today. There was also an Australian artefact here, which I already knew about. It was the Dying with Dignity machine that Dr Philip Nitschke had invented which allows the user to be injected with a drug (Nembutal) so they can terminate their suffering at their own volition. Four cancer victims made use of this machine in Darwin before the Howard Government brought the legislation undone. Since then, even more draconian restrictions have been placed on euthanasia in Oz, and none of the museums there were willing to house this machine for fear of prosecution and persecution. It is ironic that it had to end up in the relative progressivism of Mother England.

Before leaving London I paid a brief visit to Harrods where I found some snooty people who looked like nobility although they deigned to apologise to me when they hit the wrong button in the elevator. I decided it was not worth buying anything here.

All in all, London is a nice place to visit, though I don't know if I want to live there. It's impossible to visit in a weekend.

The misadventures of an elective med student in Aberdeen, Scotland

Hello and welcome to my blog. As you are probably aware, I am doing my medical elective in Cardiology at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland.

Aberdeen is Scotland's third largest city - about the size of Geelong, it is located on the northeast coast of the country about three hours from the capital Edinburgh. Being this far north, you'd expect it to be cold, and yet it ain't the case. It's high summer here and the trees and flowers are in full bloom. It's about as warm as Melbourne in spring - with breathtaking hayfever to match. It's worst on the rare sunny days... it rains most of the time here. I tried to take some antihistamines but not only didn't they work very well, I was so drowsy I nearly fell asleep on a ward round four times. It also doesn't get dark until very late - the sun sets at about 10 and even at midnight it never gets completely dark, while it's light again by four and it plays havoc with your biological clock. Anyways, Aberdeen is quite a vibrant place with a busy city centre and lots of nightlife (not so much this time of year as the students are away). It's also far more multicultural than I expected, although people of my own ilk are much less frequent than in Melbourne.

The Royal Aberdeen Infirmary is THE hospital in town and serves a catchment of over a million people. It has a total of 1500 beds, nearly three times as big as the Alfred, and incorporates a stand-alone children's hospital. There are a myriad of wards, and many are divided into male and female sections. We have a 12-bed CCU that looks after people who have had MIs or some life-threatening arrhythmia (that's an irregular heartbeat for you non-medical berks). There is not much of a private health system in Britain, instead most people get their health care through the NHS (National Health Service). NHS also takes care of many things that aren't covered back in Oz, like orthodontic treatment.

The food here is shockingly unhealthy and it sums up why this place has the highest prevalence of ischaemic heart disease in the whole wide world. Green-leaf vegetables and fruit are few and far between and even grand round food has plenty of pork pies and unwanted calories. (Haha, I can eat anything I want and stay the same size, hehe.) The national dish, "haggis, neeps and tatties", consists of a mixture of lamb and/or pork offal (heart, lungs and liver) served with mashed potato (tatties) and turnips (neeps) - it tastes vaguely good - if you don't get told about the ingredients. A traditional breakfast consists of toast, beans, sausages, Lorne (a square pork sausage), and black pudding (made from coagulated pork/lamb blood), hash browns and bacon. Eventually, today I had to go to the only Chinese buffet I could find - there are no Asian grocery shops. For five pounds ($12.50) I got lunch which was worth about a three out of ten.