The Impending Hell Week

Ah, so it has come. The last two weeks of class. I am not anticipating this one bit.

So it’s the last two weeks of class. This week I’ve had a slew of exams and I have my final Pathology exam tomorrow for lecture. There’s a lot of material, but I’ll get through it and finish it today.

Today’s the only day that I can say that I have a break in all of this craziness. The upcoming week will be much like this one in that I’ll probably be taking a final exam once at least every day. There will also possibly be an exam the following Monday.

What’s getting me through all of the studying?

I’m going to Hong Kong baby! And the best part is, that I’ll be meeting up with my girlfriend there for about 4 days of rest and relaxation!

I’m really excited about this trip, because it’s really just the thing that I need to unwind. And seeing my girlfriend, who I haven’t seen in a couple of months is just the icing on the cake. I haven’t gotten to see Hong Kong except inside the airport where I always travel through to get to and from the Philippines from New York, but in just two more weeks, I’ll be riding an airplane to see a new Asian city and I’ll be doing it with someone I love.

For all those who are also in the midst of exams, don’t give up! We’re almost through it… just have some faith!

Hwaiting! (How Koreans say, “Fighting!” in their accent… haha)

The Trip To The Equine Farm

This is actually long over due since I took this trip about 2 weeks ago, and I’ve been meaning to blog about this for awhile but just haven’t gotten around to it. Since I have a little free time on my hands, I thought I’d post about it.

My friend Miguel is a classmate of mine at CVM and so he invited all of our rotation to come out and hang out with him at his home in Batangas. We all agreed to spend some time there since at the time we were recovering from a very long bout of exams and presentations and because it was a three day weekend.

We headed to Batangas, which is about an hour-and-a-half away from Los Banos and then saw this expansive farm. We always knew that Miguel lived on an equine farm, but this farm was secluded from the rest of the homes in the area and had a lot of land. Frankly, I was really surprised, but when we got there we got to experience a little of what they do on the farm.

Miguel’s family is really warm and welcoming. It was a great to have a break at his place since it was ultra cozy and the food was good! Miguel’s mom is a really good cook I have to say.

Just take a look at that spread! Yum!

I also played a little piano for the folks. Apparently Miguel’s mom likes piano players… haha.

Miguel allowed us do take a tour of the farm and we got to see some really cool Thoroughbred horses. These are really different from the horses that we worked on TABON back at Los Banos as these horses were huge! Also, they were clean and well-taken care of. Miguel’s farm usually raises horses and then sells them to places where they’ll get trained for horseracing.

We did some interesting things, like doing rectal palpation and ultrasound on pregnant and non-pregnant horses. I have to say, that it’s a skill that I have to develop since I don’t do it too often, but it was still cool to do it on these nice looking horses nonetheless.

We eventually even got to ride the horses. It was only a teaser horse so it was quite small. While the girls are small and me and the other guys felt bad riding it. It seemed really tired… :(

Miguel’s mom kept feeding us so eventually we retired to the house once again. There was a karaoke machine that we all gathered around. We kept singing and singing for goodness knows how long. Some decided to play basketball and golf while at the farm while others enjoyed the food, singing and company.

We were supposed to leave around 2pm but ended up staying until around 7pm! We definitely had a lot of fun and again I have to thank Miguel and his family for his hospitality.

Let’s hope we can do it again sometime!

The Manila Zoo & Avilon

Sorry I haven’t been able to post lately. As usual, I’ve been ultra busy with school, but I finally finished the week as well as this week’s surgery and have a small break to write about things. I just had dinner and wanted to take a break from things so here’s what I did this past week.

This past weekend I was told about a senior vet med students wildlife field trip that they were doing for their wildlife elective. Since they had an extra seat available on the bus I was able to tag along!

We took a trip to Manila first and visited the Manila Zoo. The job that was assigned to the students in the class was to take a look at the the multiple animal enclosures in the zoos and characterize and rank them according to how effective they were in keeping the animals and also how good they were in making them comfortable. The Manila Zoo when I entered seemed like an alright place. The infrastructure of the zoo didn’t seem too nice when I first entered and although they had a wide variety of animals the zoo itself wasn’t that big. Me and the other seniors were able to cover the entire park in an hour. I was a little disappointed with the layout of the park, but it was a zoo so I had fun looking at all the animals. There was an amazing elephant that greeted me at the entrance and they had some great tiger and lion enclosures.

After that however, we ate some lunch at the zoo eatery and at around 11:30am we headed to the next zoo, Avilon which is located about an hour-and-a-half away from the Manila Zoo.

Avilon on the other hand was a zoo with a seemingly great infrastructure and layout with great organization. The zoo much reminded me of what I saw at the Singapore Zoo as the zoo was huge, but of course the Singapore Zoo was much nicer and had many more rare animals. However, out of all the zoos I have seen in the Philippines, Avilon seemed the best funded and best laid out in general.

The visit to that zoo took us about 4 hours but it was fun walking around and getting to see all the rare animals. They had a large aviary filled with many different types of raptors and other psittacine creatures. I really love birds, so it was nice to see a large variety of them in one place.

Overall, Avilon had a great layout with some great paths, but in general, the enclosures that kept the animals in were not up to par. It was quite surprising since Avilon seemed to have more funding, but in general the cages and containers that they kept the animals in were small and somewhat unkempt. The animals in some of them did not seem comfortable, but since the layout was nice I don’t think a lot of people thought much about it.

After the 4 hour trip through the zoo, we were totally exhausted. We had left at 6:30 that morning from Los Banos, so at around 5pm we were already pooped. Me and the wildlife class then headed home which took another 2 hours.

Me and my friend Chat had dinner that night after the trip and that was quite nice too. Since then though I’ve been bogged down with exams, classes and surgeries to worry about.

Today I just finished leading our surgical team in doing a femoral, tibial and joint capsule exposure. After dinner I came home and now I’m going to take a break. I think I might hit the sack soon though. And it’s only 10pm… haha.

Anyway, I hope you liked my short story. I’m feeling like I’m not that coherent right now and my eyelids are drooping. I think that means I should get to bed.

Catch you guys later!