Back in Copenhagen... for 24 more hours

After 2 weeks of travelling, I am back in Copenhagen! I'm here until tomorrow night, when I leave to spend a week in Turkey. Here's a brief recap of the beginning of my trip, when I was travelling with my Human Health and Disease class through DIS (my study abroad program)

Poznan, Poland: It took about 12 hours to get here by bus, but the ride wasn't bad at all because I sat in the back with my friends and ended up having a good time. Poznan itself was... sad. Really really sad. There were all these buildings that looked like at one point they had been glamorous, but instead they were abandoned or in desperate need of repair. The city was gloomy and the people walking around matched their surroundings a little too well. You could tell that the city had not yet recovered from communism. Public transportation involved really old trams that everyone jammed themselves into, making sure to validate tickets every 15 minutes or risk getting an on the spot fine (or jail, if you don't have enough money on you).

Admittedly, my views about Poznan were tainted by what happened my first day there. I woke up feeling a little bit off, and ended up dramatically running out of our pathology lecture to go throw up in the bathroom. I spent the rest of the day either throwing up or sleeping, and alternating between being feeling feverish or freezing cold. Not good. Any time I tried to sit up in bed, I had to lie back down. I've never experienced anything like it before and I hope to never again. Luckily I woke up the next day feeling mostly better. I thought it was from the water (I found out too late that in Poznan the tap water is only fit for consumption after boiling), but now that I'm back in Copenhagen I found out that my host mom had the same thing happen to her on the same day so I'm guessing I actually got whatever that was in Copenhagen.

In Poznan we spent a morning shadowing a pediatrician around a hospital. This was eye opening. And sad. The hospital was very outdated, and one of the first things the pediatrician mentioned was that all of their equipment was really old and the government doesn't give them nearly enough money. We looked at hospitalized babies, like a premature baby that was really small and had jaundice and had an extremely puffy abdomen. Or a baby with fetal alcohol syndrome who was blind and has lived in the hospital for 1.5 years since it was born. I was still feeling kind of weak and dizzy from my day of illness and these children were hard to look at. At one point we were talking with a resident, and she was at the end of her call and so tired she could barely concentrate on talking to us.

Of course Poznan wasn't all bad. When I was feeling a little better I managed to go shopping in the largest mall I have ever seen. The exchange rate with the polish zloty was really good so everything was cheap. A welcome change from Copenhagen. I spent about $16 the whole time I was in Poland. The best was soft gingerbread from a small shop- a whole bag was only about $1. I bought some chocolate covered gingerbread for my host family. I also saw an opera, which was beautiful and I enjoyed it even if the subtitles were in polish.

Berlin, Germany: My new favorite city ever. I could write pages and pages about how much I loved Berlin. So much history! Such a great mosaic of old and new buildings! I saw the wall, checkpoint charlie, the Berliner Dom, went in the parliament building, ate dinner at a blind restaurant, went dancing until very late at night, went on a pub crawl with my entire group, bought perfume and marzipan, and got lost in the largest department store in Europe. That's only the beginning! Such a gorgeous place, I'm determined to go back there.

The bests "academic" part of the trip was our visit to Charité hospital. We went to a cadaver room and were shown dissected cadavers. We put on lab coats and gloves and were allowed to poke around. I held a brain in my hands. I picked up a heart, and lungs, my hands were inside of someone else feeling the small intestine or lifting up the liver. It's hard to wrap my brain around that.

I'll update more later (there's still Budapest, Venice and Florence)