A Mancunian Weekend and more

Grrr, I am not having any luck with festival tickets this year :( We had five people online and on the phone tonight, desperately trying to get Reading Festival tickets (for the 3-day bank holiday weekend at the end of August), and they were sold out within 15-20 minutes. And considering the number of tickets now being sold for exorbitant prices on ebay, they weren't sold to people who actually want to go, but rather who wanted to make a profit. Again, grrrr.

I've also been trying to purchase travel insurance this evening, which I have found to be equally frustrating-- it's difficult to figure out who is giving the best deal for the money, since their policies are all slightly different. Oh, and then there's the whole malaria and yellow fever conundrum...it wouldn't be an issue at all except that Viv and I are spending the last bit of our Peru trip in the Amazon basin. The general consensus seems to be that yellow fever vaccination is recommended but not required, and I was able to buy malaria pills at Boots today, but they are not the same kind I used in Africa (since I've taken those before, I know I wouldn't have any side effects), and one of the two types included in this Boots box is known to be ineffective against the strain of malaria found in the Amazon basin. So I don't know whether to bank on the effectiveness of the other type in the box, or just get a prescription for the kind I've used before from my GP. Well, anyway, 10 days till my flight home, woohoo!

News-- Carla is pregnant!! I'm going to be Aunt Allison!

And the weekend update: we did indeed do a ROAD TRIP (haven't had one of those in awhile) up to Manchester this weekend. I drank enough Guinness to earn my St. Patricks Day novelty hat (pic coming in the near future)- ok, so I had a little bit of help. We visited The Shambles, Manchester's oldest pub, which was moved twice, literally. The pub was moved piece by piece out of the city during the bombings in WWII. Then when the city was being rebuilt, they moved it back into city centre, piece by piece, every inch of the tudor-style pub with wooden pegs and all. We did a massive pub and bar crawl to celebrate the holiday, which included Europe's largest pub, in Deansgate...it was a Wetherspoons pub, quel surprise. Our hostel was very nice-- I don't like hostels in general, but decided I could deal with it for one night. It was relatively new, and they provided clean bedding (almost unheard of, most are bring your own bedding) with maid service, plus we took up 5 of the 8 beds in our room. Sunday we saw some of the sights, and did some shopping (window-shopping for my part). And then we had an uneventful trip back home...that is if you count snow, high winds, and a massive traffic jam upon entering Leicestershire as uneventful. The snow was pretty, it was sticking to some of the fields, and a lot of the sheep and new lambs in those fields.

Today we got some of that snow here in London, but it didn't stick at all :( I'm on my last full week of this rotation, so I've got tons of work to do, a full caseload of patients to see (ironic since I haven't had a full caseload since November), as well as my supervisor's caseload to cover since she's on a course now for two weeks. Yikes.