Study Tour

        I think this time I will work from today backwards to the study tour.  Today was great because in my Human Health and Disease class, we got to learn how to check a patient's lungs by tapping on their back and chest, listen to the patient's heart in all different places so as to hear all the valves while taking her pulse, and then we got to learn how to do spinal taps and IVs. We got to practice on manikins that had veins and a spine with red liquid in them, so we could tell when we did it correctly. First we did the cardiopulmonary stuff, and they separated the guys from the girls. Then our young female teacher Signe started to tell us that we would have to take off our shirts to see what we needed to do, and she began to pull off lizzy's shirt so that she could give a demonstration!!!! we all started laughing like crazy and thought it was so funny that Signe hadn't thought anything of it, while in America this would have been unheard of. She said that in some cases it is necessary to remove the bra but that we wouldn't do that today because 3 weeks may not be enough time for Americans to adjust to the European lack of modesty. She taught us the pulmonary part and we all took off our shirts and tried it on eachother, and then she taught us about where to listen to the heart. So there are like 14 of us standing there around our teacher wearing nothing but Jeans and bras of all varieties getting a lecture. It was so funny. and very European. 
   The IVs were really cool because after class we could try it on each other. Lizzy and I did really well on the manikin but not quite so beautifully on each other. She went first and stuck me too deep, and instead of letting her fix it, our other teacher Peter kind of took the reins and corrected her. We both wish he had let her figure it out, even though it wasn't very comfortable and did leave me with a swollen spot and a small bruise. It was worth it though in order for her to let me try. i don't know what went wrong for me, but it didn't go quite right, to low or a little off the vein, but Peter thought I had gotten it and told me to remove the needle and cap it, so I did, and in fact no blood came out, so I hadn't gotten it and it was too late to try again. That was too bad for both of us because we were both excited to really get to try it. Even still, it was all really really cool!
     I must say that a Danish gym can be quite intimidating. It doesn't seem so at first, but then you look around and see all these tall thin super fit women running really fast on the treadmills and the 6'3" and taller men lifting huge weights. They are super trim but still really really strong and also really tall. Definitely an interesting place, and then there are all the teenage guys just like at home, and they all wear workout capris. I went to the gym with Laila and Jon last night, and it was a great success.
      Also, today I got hot chocolate with raspberries in it, and it was phenomenal. the raspberries floated just beneath the whip cream and added a fabulous tart fruit taste.  I am now going to skip back to Sunday...sadly I didn't get to do too much because I had a lot of homework and a test to prepare for, but I did make my family chocolate chip cookies. Tine and I biked to the store to get supplies, and they don't have chocolate chips here, so you just buy chocolate and cut it up. I had two chocolate bars, dark chocolate and a hazelnut chocolate. when i chopped them, some pieces were barely crumbs, and others were nice chunks. The small crumbs infused the cookies with a hazelnut flavor and the big chunks were clearly evident in the cookies, like normal. I followed alice's cooking guidelines and took them out a minute early, and they were amazing!!!! I was very happy with them, and the family devoured them happily.
      The study tour from thursday to saturday for my human health and disease class was great. on Thursday we drove 2 hours to Odense on the more western island of Fyn and we visited the Hans Christian Anderson children's hospital which also had one of the best centers for children's cancer patients. We had some bread and coffee while learning about what they do and diseases they research and treat, and then we took a tour and met a baby. It was really cool, and I left feeling really inspired. Then we went into town for lunch and then half of us went to an art museum and half to the Hans Christian Anderson museum. I went to see art, and it was really cool.  Then we drove to our hostel, which was really nice and had a great dinner and then heard a talk from our fabulous student assistant (current medical student) Astrid about Danish healthcare. we went to bed really early for once and left in the morning for one of the top neurological research facilities in the world. We got a great talk about the brain and then learned all about the research they do and their collaborations with top mathematicians, physicists, doctors, and other scientists  to develop the best technology to make curing patients safer and easier.
   we went to a fancy lunch of delicious fish and chocolate mousse/wafer cake with berries in a little restaurant by the sea, and then we headed back into Arhus to go to a general practitioner's office. we learned a lot about how their health care system is set up and how it is different from ours, and i thought it was the best visit so far, partly because it was the easiest to compare to home. we had the evening free, so some of us went to a pub for dinner and got delicious hamburgers, and then we went to the grocery and bought some somersby cider. I bought pear and elderflower, and they were delicious. we were going to go to a bar and then a club, but we walked around for a while waiting for the night to get late enough. We went to a bar and hung out with some other DIS students, but my friends and I went home afterwards and skipped the club because it was getting pretty late and we didnt want to pay to get in. Even still we only got 6 hours of sleep. we woke up the next morning for a bike tour of the city, in the rain, and our guide was quite talkative. It took 5 hours but we did get to visit the royal summer house gardens, and we learned how to tell a building from the 1500's from one built in the 1600's or 1700's. and I thought that was pretty cool. we had traditional smørbord for lunch (open topped sandwich) and they were pretty good, although i wasn't entirely sure what i was eating. 
      Finally we went to an art museum, but we were all so wet and cold that Astrid bought us all cafe lattes from the museum cafe first. we went to see the "I Love You" visit with a tour guide, and he was young and quite inappropriate, and it was actually hilarious. when we arrived he told us that his english might not be great because he had just been napping in the employee lounge, and at the end of the visit, he asked if we had any questions bc if not he was ready to go start drinking because it was the perfect weekend since his girlfriend was out of town. I don't really know why that is a good thing, but it was pretty funny that he told all of us that as part of the tour.