Party Time

Summary

Well what a week this has been! Friday night was the staff party which went down with a bang (or three!) - Kiki now covered in bruises from falling off the highest high heels ever; check photo later.  Lots of things going on in the club... Unfortunately, I am tired and didn't take many photos, so this will be the shortest blog ever.  Sorry.

Me on a Romanian train.
I like Romanian trains

Party

Tres Braz hotel - the venue
top of picture on edge of trees

The hospital staff party happened on Friday.  It was lovely to be invited, and it was really good fun. Everybody paid 53 Lei (RON) which is about 11 UK Pounds.  For that we had a really decent three course meal.  Pints (Litres) of coffee.  Loads of beer, wine and soft drinks - starting off with some fizz and then an aperatif.  Pretty good value.   About 130 staff, so not all the hospital.  The directors attended (and stayed until the end) which was decent of them.

Serious High Heel
prep work

Kiki, myself and Corina sat at the 'Women's Psychiatric' table.  Typically (and I am getting used to this now in my profession) there were only two men on the table including myself.  Kiki and myself were getting a bit worked up leading up to the party - it has been talked about for the last four Friday meetings.

Kiki bought some High Heels in Turga Mures and diligently aclimatised herself to them by wearing them all the time in the house for the week before - including when doing housework etc.  I also made a huge effort by ironing a shirt.

Party started at 16:00 and went on until midnight (bit early so a few of us dissapeared to the town night club for a few hours afterwards).  Very different feel to a UK works do.  The three courses were served with a good hour or so in between.  Absolutely everyone dances.  Huge range of music from traditional Romanian folk through Rock 'n' Roll and almost every other genre you could think of - very keen on Latin.

Only dancing picture Kiki
would allow me to use
Not good of me is it!

There are loads of dances that have specific steps or involve group participation.  There is no option of sitting one out - you simply get dragged onto the dance floor (actually every bit of floor space was used).  I got shoved into a line by one of the female staff trying to teach me the moves.  I managed to tread on the toe (quite hard) of one of the women's ward nurses 3 times when I kept turning the wrong way.  She probably won't be talking to me on Monday.  SHe probably won't be walking on Monday.

Everbody having a good time

It was the first chance we had to really talk to some of the staff.  We tend to focus totally on the patients when on the ward round and when we are picking patients up or dropping them off, there isn't really time as we want to try and give the patients as much club time as possible.  We are always inviting staff to the club to join in sessions. - This happens a bit, but not much.  One of the male ward staff asked me if he could practice his English with me (his English is actually very good); I agreed on condition that he comes down to the club after his shift.  Hopefully, we will start to get a few more staff coming down.

Asylums

Used to be a standard textbook

I am not going to cover it here, but we do occasionally have run ins with staff and management when we feedback what we see as very inadequate practice (and boy am I making an understatement there) with the way staff deal with patients.  I need to think more about this before I really understand what is going on and why.  I have been re-reading Goffman to try and get some perspective on this aspect of things on the wards.

Back in 1980 when I was studying pychology at university it was considered that the mental health institutions written about in Goffman's 'Asylums' (published in 1961) were way behind us - this was simply not the way we treated people any more.  No way back in 1980 did I ever think I would walk into wards which were as Goffman described (and worse) over thirty years later.

Women

Why have the party now?  Well we are coming up to International Women's Day (March 8th) which is celebrated as a Spring festival in Romania.  Men give women a special love token which is based around an intertwining of red and white thread. This is combined with another token and worn as a broach.  We have been making these all week with the women (and men) in the club and sewing them onto the female patients clothes (not allowed pins or safety pins.  We have added a heart (that we made for Valentine's day, mistakingly thinking this was the big festival), and the results look lovely.  - At this point there should be a photo of one of these, but I forgot to take one.  As I want to get the blog out on Sunday, I will try and edit a picture in late in the week, so do check back, it will be worth it.

And finally

I will finish off with a few photos.

A new church being built
in a very traditional way
with wooden scaffolding
picture could have been
taken 100 years ago (not
with a digital camera
obviously)

There are thousands of these
paving stones all branded 'PMT'
I have thought of at least 12
different jokes about this and can't
use any of them - so make up your own.

I am slowly making up a few different
running routes.  This one is a short
half mile out, over the bridge and then back. 

It is very pretty round here
loads of lovely countryside

It is very ugly around here
loads of old run down factories

Anyway that's enough nonsense for this week.  Sorry, I'm really tired.  Party was great - but it is a long time since I have been to a 10 hour full on party.  It really does take two days to recover.

Pe Curand

Paul