Short Study Tour

September 2nd

It started off raining like most days. Which isn't fun when you're carrying a suitcase.
Luckily I'm amazing and I packed light.

The first place we went was the...

It's a ropes course with a bunch of different levels of difficulty. After doing the blue course that everyone did, I felt like I was good for the day. There was a full hour left though, so I finally made myself attempt the next one, the red one, a level harder than the one I'd just done. It started off rough, on logs suspended from wire that swing out really far if you step on them wrong. I really hated those, and they used a lot of energy. Near the middle/end, I was on standing on a single wire, holding onto another wire that would not hold my weight, and I had to grab move along the wire putting most of my weight on the ropes hanging from above that were pretty far away from each other. I did this one with no one in front of me and no one in back, and at the middle of the wire, where it was very flimsy, I felt like crying and calling for help to get down because it was basically torture, and I'm not afraid of heights but I AM afraid of being on a high wire that is very flimsy in the rain and cold. After some minutes of contemplating calling for help, I decided I didn't want to be the only one who needed to call for help, so I went on slowly but surely and finished the whole thing by myself. 

Now I'm basically superwoman and I can do anything.

That was a crappy feeling, though. I'm pretty sure it was like a midlife crisis.

At least I looked...adorable?

Haha. I had my camera and my phone in my pocket and stuff kept getting caught on the harness and oh boy...

This guy is a senior at Mac, who I never met before this day.
And this is Josie who is in my Human Health and Disease class.
Josie likes me because I make funny faces.

Some of the course was super fun, but sometimes I asked myself, "Why am I doing this?" because I was actually really scared of slipping and falling on the platforms and getting hung by the wires.

Irrational?

Then, when everyone was sufficiently tired from that, we went to the birthplace of Hans Christian Andersen, Odense (like OH in suh). It was pretty much the cutest town ever.

Here's his childhood home.

And the typical adorableness of the homes.

Homes on the river where HC's mom used to wash people's laundry.

A crypt in the town church.

Then we're on the bus, off to Kolding. Denmark west of Copenhagen has a lot of land between cities, kind of like the midwest.

So we ate curry and chicken at a cafe in town which was a mile or so downhill from the hostel. Then we got ice cream.

And instead of going out like most people would, we go to bed.
Our room was pretty big, almost like a hotel. Private bathroom, super comfy twin mattresses, lights above each pillow...it was pretty impressive.

September 3rd

Breakfast at the hostel was pretty good, too.

Trapholt Modern Art Museum = chairs.

It's a Danish design fetish.

I feel like I've seen so many chairs.

And then there was also a ton of weird, statement art.

This one was a huge controversy because the art is actually goldfish in a blender and people could walk by and press the on switch. The goldfish in here are kind of dead/in pieces. I don't think the blenders were plugged in anymore or that they replaced the goldfish because I think they deemed it unethical.

But there was also a surgery room model, and there was a video of a guy who had had liposuction eating meatballs made of his own fat.

Basically I left that museum super disturbed.

But they had a self-operating lawn mower, which is cute.

And the cube house prototype by Arne Jacobsen was actually really cool and I think that I could live in something like that.

Not to mention the cute town down in the river valley and the beautiful view.

Then we went to Koldinghus which was cool because it burned down at least twice, so there are a lot of places where they rebuilt it not in the style of the original.

And it's a castle so the view is pretty great.

Climbing the tower...

The window in the dungeon, which was mostly used as a refrigerator. Why waste the cool on the prisoners?

Fountain in the castle courtyard...

And in the middle of nowhere on our way to Ribe, there is a fancy bed and breakfast with a restaurant that I don't deserve.

Mint leaves in the water, a lit candle, a single white rose...

And a burger that I thoroughly enjoyed but that many other people couldn't finish. I mixed everything together and it was awesome. Some people didn't like the capers or the beats or the egg yolk, but when I mixed it together it was actually one of the most pleasing things I've ever eaten. Plus the bread/toast was amazing.

And once in Ribe (Reeb uh), we try to listen to the Night Watchman, who even after an hour was singing, "It's 8 o'clock", and who I could barely hear because Americans are loud and Danish teens who are forced to tour this are even louder.

The Ribe cathedral.

September 4th

The Ribe Viking Museum. Most people were just being really shitty and complaining almost the whole time that it was boring and stupid. But when in Ribe, I guess you see the Viking Museum, so I silently judged everyone who hated it and thought highly of myself for being so cultured.

And then we climbed to the top of the cathedral, or rather the 250 step tower.

The hostel our second night was much smaller, and therefore I had a worse night because the privileged girls I was staying with had nothing positive to say and hated everything. So I hated them. Whoops. But there was a really nice gym for playing soccer or badminton and table tennis tables in the basement.

Our bus. Very nice.

A private hospital near Copenhagen.
You click one of four smiley faces to tell them how you're feeling on the way in/out of your visit. I learned a lot about the private vs. public hospitals in Denmark, and basically, there are no right answers and each doctor thinks his place does things the best way possible.

And Miley Cyrus was in the newspaper I saw in the waiting room.

The first day we went to the HC Andersen children's hospital, which is part of the Odense University, and I saw a super premature baby who needed a CPAP for lung function, and a 4 year old boy who was born with his intestines outside of his body, and surgery allowed him to live, but his parents need to stay home to take care of him all the time. The government pays their old salaries because that's cheaper than taking care of him in the hospital. He needs to be fed through a tube in his veins in addition to eating orally, because his intestines can't absorb enough of the nutrients in food.

We were basically bombarded with ethical dilemmas and decisions. It's really hard because there's money and people and feelings and politicians and doctors...and there's never a unanimously popular decision, and it's about people's lives.

The second day we went to a private clinic, where there were about 6 GPs that owned the clinic and bought all the equipment and everything, but it's different from a private hospital because the government health program pays for it. If you don't have private insurance, it costs money to go to the private hospital unless you'd be on a waiting list for surgery or something for more than a month or two.

It was a ton of information.

I need to use my experience to write a research paper with a girl in my class about the organization of and entry into the health care system.

I am pretty tired after all that, but I really liked seeing so much stuff apart from Copenhagen.

I'm definitely leaving some stuff out of this entry, but there was just so much that we did. I'm excited for the long study tour now, haha. Hospitals and activities in Budapest and Vienna sound like a little bit more fun than in Western Denmark.

But it was really great. 

I just wish "pre-med" students weren't mostly pretentious, horrible human beings. And shitty travel companions.