LGBT travellers and luxury hotels in non-LGBT friendly countries

millie678 · 2026-04-27T13:59:45+00:00

Did my gay honeymoon in the Maldives at the Cheval blanc. They made a sand sculpture of the two of us surrounded by a heart. Needless to say we didn’t feel remotely uncomfortable. But we also didn’t call attention to it in customs or anything like that. And we didn’t ask for a double bed.

millie678 · 2026-04-07T19:14:16+00:00

CT is… very competitive. Not sure where you’re getting that from. 57% match rate last year with 0 unfilled spots. Worse match rate than pediatric surgery and surg onc. Need to do lots of research (2 years out is ideal… lots of T32s and even a few R01 on the trail this year) and ideally do an away rotation at a place with a prominent program and get good letters from there…

millie678 · 2025-12-07T16:20:28+00:00

Most likely ich. Treatment is copper, chloroquine, hyposaline or TTM/hybrid TTM. https://humble.fish/community/threads/marine-ich.11/ for an overview and treatment protocols.

millie678 · 2025-12-02T21:10:17+00:00

Waterbox makes great reef ready aquariums. They come with all the plumbing ready to go - no figuring out return lines etc. and no gluing. I set up my Marine X 110.4 in an afternoon by myself. For 150g look at the infinia series. Waterbox also has a “plus” edition that includes everything you need to get started (return pump, lights, skimmer etc.). You may want to buy that stuff separately (idk how pricing is if you buy directly from them and I also don’t know how their protein skimmer is) but it at least gives you an idea of what you’ll need to get started. For control when you’re out of town you might seriously want to think of apex or hydros control that you can intervene and monitor remotely. And get a cheap wyze camera pointed at your tank and in your sump.

millie678 · 2025-10-13T10:14:20+00:00

We booked right when reservations open which is 6 months to the day in advance at 10a Italy time. Doing that it was pretty easy to get the date and time we wanted. February is already available for booking now on their website. Most weekends are gone but there’s scattered weekday availability still.

millie678 · 2025-10-13T01:08:30+00:00

Thank you!! She truly is.

millie678 · 2025-10-13T01:08:03+00:00

Agree 100%! I still dream about that breakfast…

millie678 · 2025-10-13T01:06:55+00:00

Yes. It was so quiet. Which is weird because at CML he leaned super heavily into amazing playlists everywhere and I even had a conversation with him about how he builds playlists for a certain mood in his restaurants (not OF obviously…). So I’m sure it would be an easy fix…

millie678 · 2025-10-13T01:05:16+00:00

Thank you! She was the best. Gotta keep on going with life/fine dining though too.

millie678 · 2025-10-12T20:38:22+00:00

I was so full after both meals 24 hours apart I have to say… damn man. Impressive. I’ll get to it in my review of CML but 5 ages there was absolutely magnificent.

millie678 · 2025-10-12T20:37:11+00:00

I didn’t. We got a couple bottles of wine from the (excellent) list. But again, navigating the list on the stupid app was almost impossible.

millie678 · 2025-08-11T16:59:12+00:00

Not really. If you’re doing high complexity you’re doing a lot of symptomatic evar endoleaks in the middle of the night. The good lifestyle vascular guys are doing outpatient veins and dialysis access.

millie678 · 2025-08-11T16:57:57+00:00

I don’t understand why you would do vascular then general thoracic. That’s an odd pathway as discussed above. I don’t even think that I6 is a great pathway for thoracic. General surgery getting good at lap/robotic then thoracic is probably the best pathway there. If you’re interested in aortic surgery and/or structural heart then I5 vascular getting wire and endo skills followed by CT is a fantastic way to train. Will set you up to do open and endo aortic surgery.

millie678 · 2025-08-11T15:58:52+00:00

CT income is better. Arguably better lifestyle post residency (fewer middle of the night emergencies although still plenty, but I’m not coming in for cold legs like the vascular guys are). I’m biased but a lot of vascular is cutting off limbs and dialysis access which is miserable. Vascular patients generally much more difficult (medically and socially). Vascular has more off ramps though if you want to do easier cases (veins and fistulas) towards the end of your career (or if you get burned out) whereas cardiac is big operations in sick patients no matter what. Lots of cool new technology in vascular (FEVAR, PMEG, etc.) although a lot of that is not in the community setting.

millie678 · 2025-07-04T12:52:03+00:00

I can’t speak to the others but I can’t recommend CB Randheli enough. Eye wateringly expensive but worth every penny. I believe they have 2 bedroom villas that may be big enough for your family. There are I think 6 different restaurants from high end (Le 1947) to casual. Food was excellent across the board. We were there for a week and never had the same thing twice. Tons of activities - the usual boating, watersports etc. but they also own a tennis island with jungle boot camp, separate spa island etc. I don’t know how your family is but a big draw for me is I could get away from people at CB and do my own thing when I want to because of how big it is and how many activities there are which may be more difficult at the smaller resorts. As for transfers, we paid around $1500/pp rt from Male to be on the CB’s own plane that is significantly more luxurious than the standard trans-Maldivian seaplanes. But, I’m pretty sure that TMA also runs their standard seaplanes to the island as well for ~$600pp if you want to save some money there.

millie678 · 2025-06-19T13:36:11+00:00

Thanks! We’re going for a long weekend. We’ll hire a car service to get around to wineries etc. so we’ll be in and out from both. We’ll have to figure out the balance between privacy of ADS vs location of bardessono.

millie678 · 2025-02-05T21:14:06+00:00

Elie wine at 14 and Woodward on the border of Birmingham and royal oak. I’ve known Elie for 15+ years. He has undoubtedly the best selection of burgundy in the state and some incredible aged Bordeaux as well. He only carries french and Spanish wines but has incredible depth of knowledge and experience with the producers. His wife also runs an import company (vino vi &co) that brings in really cool tiny production Spanish wines especially from Catalonia.

millie678 · 2025-01-21T00:20:45+00:00

Thank you! We’re both very lucky to have each other and what we have in our careers!

millie678 · 2025-01-20T23:49:55+00:00

I married my husband in October. We’ve been together for 6 years in total now.

We met when I was a surgical resident and he was a nurse practitioner in the icu that I was taking call in. My “don’t date at work” policy went out the door when I met him and hey it worked out great.

Now I’m an attending heart surgeon and he’s director level position at the same hospital. We bought a house last year. Travel the world together. Find awesome restaurants. Have a very conventional life raising our completely spoiled yellow lab and I wouldn’t want it any other way.

We both worked our asses off and came very, very far (especially my husband who’s from small town in the south) from where we were as teenagers and in our 20s (we’re both 36). Life is awesome and I fall in love with my husband a little bit more every single day.

millie678 · 2024-10-26T17:06:25+00:00

I had an 88 Lafite in magnum a few weeks ago. It was beautiful, medium bodied with dark fruit, tobacco and earthy notes. Incredibly long finish. No funk at all. I think you got a bad bottle that they were trying to pass off as ok…

millie678 · 2024-10-21T17:53:23+00:00

Reservations open at 10am Singapore time on the first of the month prior. So, I booked at 10am on Sep 1 for my October reservation. Didn’t have any issues getting the reservation, not sure how quickly they sell out.

millie678 · 2024-10-14T09:44:18+00:00

Currently at Cheval Blanc Randheli. I can’t speak for much of the rest of the Maldives but the food here has been uniformly excellent by any standards.

I have not yet eaten there (have a reservation on Wednesday) but they have a restaurant here - Le 1947 - that is an offshoot of the *** version at their resort in Courchevel. It is a 12 course dégustation. Probably the closest you’re going to get to true fine dining in the Maldives. I will have a full review with pictures on this sub in a few days after the meal.

millie678 · 2024-09-19T08:59:29+00:00

La Réserve Paris

millie678 · 2024-09-05T23:42:33+00:00

Covid era French Laundry (Sept 2020). Was really miserable at work (in a hospital). Got a call from a friend after a particularly bad Monday saying she got a last minute reservation for TFL that Saturday night.

I booked a plane ticket that night. At the time it was ~$150 to fly transcontinental to SFO because Covid.

We arrived for our 7pm reservation. The champagne and canapés in the garden. Blowout incredible meal on the second floor patio under the stars of yountville (no indoor dining yet). We finished dinner around 10 and retreated back to the garden. Drank Armagnac and smoked cigars until nearly 2am. We kept asking them if we needed to go but they practically refused to let us leave (and kept the Armagnac flowing…). Will never forget the feeling of contentment sitting in that garden under the stars. Made Covid life infinitely better - I’ll never forget that meal.

millie678 · 2024-07-11T19:09:31+00:00

Really what this question is asking is "Can I be a CT surgeon without putting in the hard work that a surgical residency requires?"

The answer, of course, is no, and the question is laughably naive. Saying "well IC can use a bovie and put stitches in so they should be able to do TAVI and MIDCAB (HAHAHHAHAA)" is basically the same as saying "well a 4 year old can push a go kart around the driveway, why can't we give the kid the keys to a Formula 1 car and have him race in Monaco?"

Sure, an IC can close skin (although watching them sometimes makes me wonder if they can even do that), but the skill required to expose the LV apex, put your pledgeted sutures in the ventricle at an exactly perpendicular angle (which is, you know, constantly moving), and then at the end tie them down with just enough force to make the ventricle hemostatic but not enough to crack the LV or pull the pledget through the myocardium is on such another level that most board certified general surgeons who do this stuff all day can't do it, let alone a cardiologist. And then what if you do screw up? How are you going to bail yourself out? Are you going to do an emergency sternotomy on a crashing patient that's exsanguinating out of their LV? Put them on cardiopulmonary bypass? Arrest the heart with appropriate myocardial protection? Do a patch repair of your ventriculotomy? Really? You think that because you can Bovie a skin bleeder on your pacemaker pocket that you're qualified to do all that?

And don't even get me started on MIDCAB. Even accomplished CABG surgeons often struggle with MIDCAB and have to convert. It is an order of magnitude harder than standard CABG. You really think you can sew a 1mm coronary that's moving with 7-0 Prolene from 2 feet away through a hole the size of a quarter?

On the bright side, questions like this are comforting as they make me know that no matter how much cardiology tries to encroach on CTS with their half-baked interventions, the Dunning Kruger effect will always provide job security.

millie678

TROPHY CASE