Philippines Capstone 2018: January 9th: Quezon Memorial Park, Heart Center, & Market Market

By Hannah Taylor

On our first Tuesday in the Philippines, we had a busy, or a "toxic" day as our Filipino friends would say. After eating breakfast, our Filipino buddies joined us to visit a few landmarks. Our first stop was at Quezon Memorial Circle park https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manuel_L._Quezon, which is a national park located in Quezon City. The national park has many beautiful spaces, such a small amusement park, a memorial shrine, various smaller gardens, and even an has area for bike rentals. When we arrived, we had a little over an hour of time to spend. Many students rented bikes, and the rest of the time was spent exploring the park and looking at the different exotic plants for sale.

After exploring the Quezon Memorial Circle park, we went to Gerry's Jeepney Restaurant for lunch. This restaurant was really unique and fun to visit since the dining tables were actually in a Jeepney, which is a form of public transportation in the Philippines that is honestly super cute because it's so vibrant and colorful! At the restaurant, we ate lunch on banana leaves, and the Filipino nursing students taught us how to eat with our hands. Disclaimer: we all washed our hands before lunch; don't worry parents!

After eating lunch, we arrived at the Philippines Heart Center (PHC) around 1:30 pm for a tour of the hospital. After a brief presentation about the hospital, we broke up into three different groups to begin our tour. The PHC is a 354 bed tertiary center focused on the care of cardiovascular patients, which is composed of 21 nursing care units. These nursing units include 74 semi-private rooms, three adult service wards, a pediatric service ward, 53 ICU beds, 24 suites, 56 private rooms, and one presidential suite. The hospital was originally designed to have four "petals" on each floor, which was meant to represent the four chambers of the human heart. A highlight of the tour for many of the students were visiting the presidential suite; attached is the link to a video captured by Courtney Schoen, our extremely talented videographer! https://youtu.be/LcgJOX2EMyE

After the tour of The Philippines Heart Center, we stopped at our final destination—Greenhills "Market Market." We went into the area of the mall where you can bargain with the vendors, which was full of what easily looked like one hundred pearl shops. Each of us was paired with a Filipino buddy, who were all great in helping us bargain for good and fair deals! Below is a personal statement from CSS nursing student Jenna Sands—a novice pearl fanatic!

"I didn't realize that I wanted or even had a need for pearls until I arrived at the market. It was a landmine of pearls!! I was on the hunt for string necklace with a purple pearl and literally, only one booth had what I was looking for but was selling it for P350 ($7.00). I had Carlos, Jay, Bayer, Kyle, and Heven (students at Mary Johnston) all looking for a cheaper necklace in the massive sea of pearl booths. The first booth was the only place and they even hand made a new one so it was to my liking. I don't how (because everyone was speaking Tagalog), but the boys got the owner to lower the price to P280 (about $5.00) What a STEAL!!" -Jenna Sands