It's 1.30am on Friday evening when I am writing this journal entry because I can't sleep. The last few days have seen a good mix between the work hard, play hard culture the Kiwi's employ. Yesterday when I went to work I felt a little reluctant about going as the day before had felt like I was ignored so much and was not given the time to try to explain the things I would like to do during my placement. However I had a good afternoon looking around the city and so went in to work the next morning eagerly. I arrived, changed and began, with what was becoming my base, to sit and scroll through the list of patients in the department at the nurses station....the doctor's one was too intimidating! I was reading through what types of cases had come through since the previous evening when I was asked, was I doing anything? The words I had longed to hear since my first day!! 'Well we'd better get you some patients of your own, hadn't we?' My first patient was a person suffering from pleuritic chest pain who had quite a complex social history which made it all the more interesting. I took his vitals (trying to work out the equipment and attempting to look slick as I went!! They use thermometers here that you place above the temporal artery, no skin contact is made! Try looking like you know what you're doing with something that looks as if it should be from Star Trek!) I then presented my patient back to the SHO and we agreed on a management plan, so I took some bloods and did an ecg and then took the patient to x-ray. First case under my belt I felt like I was now becoming part of the team rather than just an observer. The SHO got tied up with her patients, so I went to some teaching they had going on and then headed back to the ED where the Californian consultant decided to set me challenges with time limits which he thought was hilarious! My next patient was a rugby player who had been involved in an on field head collision several days ago and was coming back for review. I removed his sutures (for the first time) and then was told how to examine a patient with a minor head injury. He then showed me how to write prescriptions and the common mistakes people make. This was an excellent day; teaching, theory and practical skills! I then went in to Wellington in the late afternoon to get round a few more of the cafes!! I am going to have to do more than one a day to sample them all in the time I have here, it's a coffee metropolis, awesome! We then went out for one of the guys birthdays who lives on my corridor, another med student, most are, we are known as the transients to the accommodation office. We went to a bar in the banking region of the harbour and then onto one red dog for a pizza. They made the strangest combinations I'd ever seen but all tasted amazing. So pizza in belly, we put our dancing shoes on and danced till 2 in the morning in a bar with live bands covering all the classics of the 80's, 90's and a few from today....my kind of place.