We're in Beijing!

Greetings All,

Well we made it to Beijing without any difficulties. The flight from San Francisco to Beijing was about 12 hours, and I only slept about 3 of it. We are 13 hours ahead of Houston right now, so I am still adjusting to that. Yesterday we just got settled in to the dorms here and went out to dinner. We went to a Muslim restaurant due to the fact that neurocysterciscosis is endemic here and is transmitted through pork... due to the language barrier, Muslim preparation is the easiest way to avoid pork. The food here is amazing so far, but different from our American-Chinese food. There is a lot more tofu, and Kung Pao chicken is about the only thing that I've recognized so far.





Today we went to Tiantan Hospital which specializes in neurosurgery. It is one of the premier hospitals here for neurosurgery and patients come from all over the country for operations, but the facility was about on par with LBJ Hospital in Houston (our county hospital). We were escorted around by the residents there and I was able to spend some time with the Anesthesiologist during one of the operations. They seem to do things very similar to the way we do things, however there ideas on sterile techniques are a little interesting. We saw one of the attending surgeons "scrub in" and proceed to dry his hands off on his gown. But even more amazing than that, is that we were all required to take off our own shoes and wear slippers into the OR! Even the surgeons were wearing open toed shoes.



This evening we had our welcoming banquet with all of the students, including another smaller group from Buffalo, New York, as well as two of the faculty members from our host school, Capital Medical University. The meal was fantastic, and ended with traditional Peking Roast Duck.

Well that's about all I have for right now. I'm still trying to catch up with the jet lag, so I'm going to head off to bed. I'll try to post more soon as it seems that we will have unlimited internet access in our dorms.


再见 (Goodbye),
Adam