Finally some improvements!

Thanks for all your messages of support about Carla! And I promise, no more demonstrations. Irene and I will both send angry e-mails for Carla, as soon as I´ve left the clinic ;)

I´m happy to say that this week is already going a lot better than last week. I arrived at the clinic on Monday and was told that I had to go to the sister clinic in Coruco Viejo after all, which wasn´t the deal, so I was a bit annoyed at first. But it turned out to a good thing, because the vet I´m working with, Eliseth, is great. She´s really nice and clearly a better surgeon than Franklin. Yesterday, after watching how she does it, I castrated a male cat and sterilised a female one by myself (with her as my assistant) and today I did 3 female cats and 2 males. The first cat sterilisation went so well I couldn´t believe it. No problems at all, even Eliset was impressed with me! Yay!

Also I watched how she castrated a dog, hopefully I´ll get a chance to do it myself if we get any dogs but so far it´s almost all cats. The only thing is, here they sterilise the cats through their flank, not their belly as in Holland, so that´s the only way I´ve learned it. In some ways it´s easy than through the belly, but I think the scar looks ugly so I wouldn´t really want to use that method myself. But at least I know how to do it, if I ever have to. The dogs and cats are anesthetised with a combination of ketamine, atropine and xylazine, and kept knocked out with ketamine during the operation - no gas anesthesia.

So I´m staying until the end of the week. Irene and I are leaving for the mainland after that. It´s a shame I haven´t seen more of the island, but there are so many amazing things in the rest of the country, we already have a rough plan of things we want to see.

Apart from that we went out last Saturday night with Mike, an English friend of his called Justin and 2 Venezuelans that Justin knows. Of course we also met some Dutch people there... It was a great night! We went to a club called Kamy Beach, which is basically a huge beach hut next to the sea, so it was partly open air, and still lovely and warm at night. It´s a hard life ;) On Sunday we took it easy, I finally visited the beach opposite our hotel and Irene stayed in bed most of the day :p Yesterday evening we went to a big shopping centre in Pampatar, not far from here, for dinner and a look around the shops. Isla Margarita is THE place to shop, although at the shopping centre there were mainly designer names and posh boutiques, although we did find a place selling some nice affordable clothes, including nice Gap clothes - 6 euros for a t-shirt, yes please!

Oh yes, and if you´ve read Irene´s blog you´ll already know this, but apparently our hotel, which is a very nice, popular place with backpackers, is apparently used by the local prostitutes... I didn´t have a clue, but really you wouldn´t know it, it´s all very discrete! One of the girls who came to kamy Beach with us is apparently a prostitute, but she was such a lovely girl. And her name, believe it or not, was Jennifer Lopez!

Anyway I hope that´s comforted you all (especially my mother) - I´m safe and well and getting lots of work experience!