Change of plans

The thing I hate about putting off blogging is that I can't type everything that I want to. Lots of cool stuff this past week but the most interesting and pressing is this:

I have left Huancayo and just bought my plane ticket for Iquitos, a port on the Amazon River in the middle of the jungle.

Yeah, I'm pretty stoked, but it was hard to leave. It's always hard to leave. I met some really great folks in Huancayo including my expat crowd, the doctors and interns, my host family and newly met friends that I never got to know well enough.

This week in the hospital I finally got to see a few surgeries for hydatid cysts which was pretty interesting. One was in a kid of about 11 years old who had two hard-to-access liver cysts. Pretty interesting surgery, but straightforward. I got to do a little more suturing this week on skin, but other than that, it was a pretty typical week of watching surgeries, attending rounds in the mornings and hanging out in the ER in my downtime.

Outside the hospital this week, I took off to play soccer with the surgeons at a doctors' pavilion for recreation. I played goalie and had a few nice saves, but let in a lot of goals too. They ended up hanging out for hours afterward passing around bottle after bottle of Cusquena and telling stories. Not my favorite post-game activity, but later I was invited to a doctor's house for a fantastic meal.

I also ended up over at the expat house one night for crepes courtesy of our French-English friend and met up with my friend from the disco a few nights this week for late-night snacks and conversation. Dr. Montano gave me a great send-off by inviting me over to listen to music and drink some wine. He presented me with a surgery manual in English that he had from training in Cuba... quite a gift!

My host family and I went out for dinner at La Lena (there are about a million of these, but the one on Brena is the best) where I had one more amazing steak before heading out. The next day they prepared an awesome lunch of basically fajita steak, onions and tomatoes and homemade chocolate pudding for dessert!

I met up with Joseph the Peruvian with my backpacks in tow to head out to obtain passage to Lima. I ended up booking with a car instead of a bus because the bus was really expensive during the day and driving in a car is much faster (supposedly) but one broken fan belt later found me sitting on the side of the road between Huancayo and Lima hanging out with my newfound friends, the other passengers in the car, one of whom was a policeman from Lima. Good times.

We finally arrived and I met up with Mario and a big group of his amigas to close the night out with karaoke.