Mixed blessing

My last day of work (2 days ago) started off great. I went to one of the clinics for indigent people (where my refractionist works). It was enriching to look around and see what various clinics are like in the city. The first room was the “emergency/triage” area – where a British general practitioner was volunteering for two weeks. The clinic is a free clinic that’s entirely run off donations, but the facilities were still well-kept and spacious and far more contemporary than I would’ve thought for a free clinic in Vietnam. For instance, the Ob-Gyn exam room had a portable ultrasound, there was a laboratory complete with CBC and chem machine. It was even air-conditioned and had an elevator. Pretty fancy.

Then, the day started to go downhill. We went to a tour agency (since we’re out of work until Sunday, my mom and I decided to take a little trip to Angkor Wat) that’s downtown and my mom thought we since we were downtown, we should go shopping. If you don’t know, I’m really not a shopper. When go to the mall at home, I often end up spending about 1/5 of my time in the mall and the remainder in the bookstore (looking at architecture books – I’m sort of pre-school about books. I’m much more of a picture-looker than I am a reader). We ended up going to three malls and one market so I ended up shopping for 6 hours today! I think I’ve done all the shopping I need to do for the next year. At least I got some interesting pictures from the market:

These are dragonfruit

And my favorites… mangosteen!

And jackfruit

And even snakewine. Apparently its good for your liver and GI tract.

We also visited the oldest church in HCMC. I’d never seen Vietnamese people in stained glass before so I HAD to take a picture.

And I had never seen a saint wearing Vietnamese clothing before, either!