I am glad today was the last day of my on-call. I handed off the pager to the next pharmacist this evening at 5pm. I had three more calls today, one at 3am, one at 9am, and one at 4:30pm… I couldn’t easily get back to sleep this morning and got woken up again by the morning page. I really don’t know how the pharmacists here can handle this. If I was working a graveyard shift and had to answer drug information questions while on shift, I’m fine but to be woken up abruptly by a beeper and have to be coherent to whoever is on the phone is tough. I’m looking forward to a good night’s sleep tonight.

Today is actually Vesak Day which is a public holiday in Singapore so I didn’t have to go into work today. It’s sometimes called “Buddha’s Birthday” but is actually a celebration of the birth, enlightenment, and passing of Gautama Buddha. Each religion here has at least one celebration that is a national public holiday.

But although I didn’t have to go into work, I decided I’d head out with Ron to do some studying. He still had class in the evening and had some work to do as well. I took the opportunity to finish reading the notes on breast cancer that my boss let me borrow and also to read up on Bangkok since we’re going there next weekend!

We had lunch at Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf at Holland Village before we started studying.

I had the chicken shiitake mushroom fusilli. I used my camera phone so it’s a bit fuzzy. The pasta was very creamy and had way too much shredded parmesan cheese. The toast was also stale tasting. The portion was well sized though, perhaps a bit too much and the sauce was actually quite good.

Ron had the Chinese chicken salad which had a bit too much salad dressing, the lettuce was coated with it.

We stayed at Coffee Bean until I had to go meet up with the next on-call pharmacist and Ron went to class.

I met up with the pharmacist at the IMM Building to hand off the pager, laptop, keys, and other documents. Afterwards, I headed inside for some retail therapy and shopped away for 3 hours. Next week starts the Great Singapore Sale but there were a ton of pre-sales, many things were already 50% off. The stores were very crowded. I can’t imagine what it will be like when the real sale starts on the 23rd of May (it lasts through 20th July 2008).

Now it’s time to get a good night’s sleep.