Olympus, Med School, and the Square (January 3-8)

Since Warren is in med school, he has to register and start classes a month before everyone else. So on January 3rd, we headed to start his registration at the med campus (much farther from the main Pretoria University campus [and no, they don’t call it “PU”, they shorten it to “Tuks” for some reason]). Everyone was greeting each other after their summer holidays, and it was pretty neat to see. Since these people have every single class together, they’re all friends. That’s a nice thing about a small and very specific program. I went to their “registration party” that night which started on the patio of one of the common rooms. The rooms of the Olympus residence are pretty standard res rooms: single bed, desk, chair, closet, and then whatever you bring in to personalize it. But the rooms are in three-storey clustered buildings with balconies in their common rooms, and a nice courtyard in the middle of them all. They even have a res pool. However, that pool hadn’t been cleaned over the holidays, and that would be my downfall that night. Since it hadn’t been cleaned, the mosquitoes had nested there, and that night I got absolutely eaten alive by the mozzies!

The party moved from the porch to an area downtown called ‘the Square”. It really is a square courtyard surrounded by every type of bar, pub, and club you could want. And apparently it’s always full of people late at night, and just PACKED with students on the weekends.

On the weekend, we went to a market that was near the Square, and got some pretty cool things there. We even picked up some funky beads for an afternoon movie-watching project. Since Kyle’s apartment is right close by, we headed to hang out with him and Candice for a while before heading back to Warren’s house for a swim. (It was getting pretty sickly hot again.)

On Tuesday, I went with Warren to his anatomy practical in the morning. We sat in groups around different stations set up at different tables. There were just human hearts at some of the stations, one of them had a pacemaker in it, and that was kind of cool to see. And at some of the other stations, they had a whole bust—everything from the ribs and lungs up! It was quite cool to look and touch, but the heat mixed with the odor of formaldehyde made for a very nauseous morning. What hit me the most about the class was that all of these people were my age and already in their THIRD year of med school! That was a shock. They don’t have to have a degree there before med school; they can go right after high school. Funny enough, South African medicine programs are apparently the most similar to the Canadian programs, and therefore lots of South African doctors have an easy time finding jobs—and sometime are even sought after—in Canada. I won’t deny that it kind of freaked me out to see the people my age in the class, and of course the goof-balls that go with it. I mean, these are supposed to be future doctors, but I still was hearing stories of second years cutting the nipples off their corpse and putting them in his eye sockets. Moral of the story: don’t donate your body to science. Donate your organs to people who need them instead.

Tuesday afternoon, I packed my things, thanked Warren’s family, said my good-byes, and Warren took me to the airport for my flight back to France. I could have stayed for so much longer. The country was so different and I really wanted to do more exploring. I’ll have to do that next time. I wasn’t looking forward to leaving a summer and going back to a winter either, but I was exhausted so thankfully the 10 and a half hour flight went by a lot quicker on the way back. It was an amazing trip, and to this day (I’m finally writing this over a month later), I still find it hard to believe that I actually went there and saw the things I saw and did the things I did. It was absolutely fantastic, and I can’t wait to go back!