The Hospital

Master Sui and Master Zeng (my Master). All the images on this site can clicked and viewed separately.



Today, Bernard and I are going out for some visa physical exams. It should be a piece of cake. I hear they only want your money-- and to make sure you don’t have AIDS. I doubt it’ll be interesting, but I’ll bring my camera just in case. We went out on a mission yesterday which seemed unworthy of a camera, but I should have brought it. We ended up in the midst of novel sights at the Ludong University market.

I’m famished. We’ve been told not to eat or drink this morning on account of the blood test, or something like that. Sounds pretty bogus to me. I could guzzle so much water before it started interfering with a test like that. Anyways, I’m starving and I want some pancakes.

These brisk, sunny mornings remind me of spring in Alaska. It hardly rains in Yantai, there aren’t too many trees, no mountains save one, and no ocean within detection (though I know it’s nearby). In short, the two places are dissimilar. But, with my eyes closed and the morning air drifting in I can almost forget where I am.

Written post-examination--

I’ve finally got some lunch inside me after a long morning spent at the hospital. We left around eight and caught an extremely crowded bus downtown, then took a taxi to the hospital. We met Daniel’s mother-in-law (DMIL from here on) in lobby to retrieve our passports and assorted documents, and left the rest to Andy. Everybody in line was very pushy, they were literally pushing each other out of the way to speak to the clerk, even when it was quite clear she was already engaged. Both Bernard and Andy informed me that this is normal, the standard way lines are conducted in China.

By the way, this is Andy, he doesn’t normally wear glasses.





At length we got the paperwork sorted and went upstairs to get blood drawn. It was a sketchy arrangement-- a room with two windows, much like at a movie theatre, where people extend their arms to be leeched before quickly moving along. The whole thing was very expedient, but left me feeling a bit ill. We also had an x-ray, an ultrasound, a urine test, and an ECG with an ancient, fifties or sixties machine reminiscent of an electroshock table.

I didn’t find any great photo-ops, but took this from the hospital corner, this street rates a medium-low on the rabbit-warren scale I use to quantify the many alleys.



DMIL picked us up and we stopped by Ludong University to drop off the documentation. It’s not legal here to just open up a school (for quality control reasons apparently) so smaller businesses operate under the umbrella of established institutions. Ludong is our umbrella and facilitates our visa applications.

Unrelated, this is Charlie--