Laughing In Denmark: "Studying Abroad" aka Traveling with your class: Sweden and Estonia

Our Hotel

I know I’m the worst person to ever make a blog because I never update it, but I’m going to try and catch you up on the last few months of my life over the next few posts. At the beginning of March (yes, it’s been that long) I was lucky enough to travel to Sweden and Estonia with my Medical Practice and Policy class. We left on a Sunday, arrived in Stockholm and checked into our hotel-the Quality Hotel Globe. The name was derived from the fact that the hotel is connected to a giant white globe that resembled the Epcot ball in Disney World. Sunday night DIS had planned for us to go to a vegetarian buffet restaurant. Upon hearing this reservation, I was a little disappointed. I have a good appreciation for a nice rare steak, but the vegetarian restaurant pleasantly surprised me. The food was delicious. At one point my table was discussing unique adjectives we could use to describe the food. I had just made a comment about a certain carrot salad-I couldn't figure out if I liked it or not. Right after saying that Zoe said, “It's ethereal” to which I responded, “Oh that's why I can't tell if I like it-these aren't even carrots!” This got a good laugh out of our tour leaders who were at our table. I'm not a vegetable expert like Zoe, who is a vegetarian, and apparently I don’t know the English language that well either, so when she said ethereal I thought that was a kind of vegetable. I didn't realize that she was still brainstorming adjectives. To my credit, ethereal does sound like it could be a vegetable. After dinner, we took a walk around “old town” Stockholm. Keith, one of our tour leaders, walked us through the city, pointing out different areas that are mentioned in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo book, including Gamla Stan.

On Monday we went to visit the Doctors of the World Clinic. This is a health clinic for undocumented migrants. They believe that the law should not interfere with one's duty to provide health care to those in need. In Sweden, in order to be entitled to health care you must have a valid social security number that you are issued upon being a citizen. Those in the process of applying for citizenship, or have been denied citizenship, are therefore unable to attain health care. The location of the clinic is kept a secret. The doctors and nurses are all volunteers and all of the medicine they have is donated. The focus of the clinic is to provide simple services, like pain medication, as well as pregnancy and HIV testing. No surgeries are done here. The picture below is that of a poster hanging in the clinic that caught my attention. Its purpose was to spread the idea that the criminal justice system should not be interfering with health care services. It was such a different concept than any Americans are used to. We are building fences and doing anything to keep illegal immigrants out of the country, and although the Swedish Health care System wasn't exactly welcoming, this program was established as a way to at least make their life a little easier. After that we went to the Stockholm Pre-hospital Center. We were taken into what appeared to be an underground cave. What kind of hospitals do they have in Sweden? It turns out that we were in the bomb shelter, 12 meters underground, and it was in fact a cave. The rock walls had been painted white and decorated with framed artwork as well as having glass vases on display in an attempt to make it seem less like a cave. Here we were given a presentation on cardiology. The pre-hospital center focused on preventative measures so that people wouldn't end up in the hospital in the first place.

Not your ordinary hospital

Entrance to room used to decontaminate people before they are admitted

This reminded me of something out of Lost

Vases...to make it less creepy

Thought provoking poster for Doctors of the World

"Doctors in the World"

Tuesday we went to the Capio Artro Clinic which is a sports trauma research center. This is one of the top arthroscopic surgery centers in all of Sweden. We were able to watch an ACL surgery via a live camera feed from the operating room. Although I had already seen my own ACL surgery, it was interesting to watch it done on someone else. This particular patient also had the graft taken from their hamstring. What was interesting about this clinic is that they had focused on specializing doctors so much that they were able to cut down the time needed for many surgeries-the entire ACL surgery was only 45 minutes long! They had also created an ACL database in order to track their patients after the surgery and see how their rehab was going. In this way, they were able to see how the different ways of repairing the ACL compare in order to know which way should be used more often in the future. I also learned that I am part of a very small percentage of people who actually re-tear their ACL after they have had it repaired. Wahoo! A unique thing about the clinic is that their physical therapy program is in the same building that the surgeries take place in. By integrating all of the recovery stages into one place, it was very easy to track each patient's progress. After this we went on an “ice-breaking boat” tour in order to see Sweden from the water. I had envisioned men with ice picks going out on the ice in order for us to get through. However, this was far from the reality. It was a sunny day, and although it was a little cold, it was nowhere near cold enough for ice. The top deck of the boat was filled with real animal skins that were blowing gross, coarse, animal hair all over. So, along with our complimentary pea soup, I'm pretty sure I also ate some animal hair. Yummm. I also had my first cup of hot wine. What a great idea. After this tour we were given three options to choose from for the next activity. I chose to go to the Modern Museum of Art where I was able to see some pieces by Picasso and Matisse. One of my favorite displays was a ketchup display. Finally, someone else who understands just how great ketchup really is. For dinner we went to a cute little restaurant where we were served Swedish Meatballs-how authentic. We later found out that they were made from reindeer meat. All I kept thinking about was that I had eaten poor Rudolph. I'm definitely being put on the naughty list next year.

Yup, definitely ate a couple of those hairs

Stockholm from the water-not much ice to be broken

So pretty!

When modern art goes too far-this display was located above the toilet-it is an exact replica of the stall I was in, so naturally I spent about 5 minutes looking to make sure that there was not a camera pointed at the real toilet

KETCHUP :)

Oh hey Prancer

I loved the narrow side streets

Royal Palace

Uppsala Cathedral

Wednesday we left Stockholm and headed to Uppsala. On departing from the hotel we had a new addition to our bus-a tour guide. Tour guides are nice to have, except when they are 60 year old woman who used to be in the Swedish Royal Opera for 23 years and insisted on singing Oh What A Beautiful Morning through the bus speakers at 9am when we were all trying to sleep. No points won there. In Uppsala we saw the Uppsala Cathedral, Scandinavia's largest church, as well as the burial place of many archbishops and kings. After that we went to Uppsala University, the oldest University in Sweden. Here we were able to go into their library as well as see the famous Silver Bible. The main room in the library reminded me a lot of the PRR in Rush Rhees, except it was about twice the size, with two spiral staircases on either side that led up to three different balconies that overlooked the whole room. It was a really great room, although I'm not sure how much studying I would be able to do in there-there was just too much to look at. After that we went to Old Uppsala where we saw the Viking mounds, consisting of three giant mounds of earth. Not much to look at, but kind of cool to know that three Viking kings were buried under them. One part of our lunch in Old Uppsala consisted of a reindeer meat sandwich. Santa is really going to hate DIS. From there we went to Sigtuna. We weren't in Sigtuna for more than 25 minutes. They are known to have the smallest town hall in all of Sweden (ohhh ahhh), but other than that the only thing I saw was the tourist center and their bathroom. After Sigtuna we were dropped off at our ferry that would take us to Estonia. Leaving Sweden also meant leaving our crazy tour guide, but not before she sang us a Russian opera song, not once but twice. Needless to say, she wasn't missed when we went to Estonia. Our ferry over ended up being a decent size cruise ship. With nothing better to do for the night, we took advantage of the duty free store. The ship also had a disco and a cabaret nightclub. We managed to entertain ourselves for the night, but the combination of terrible food, alcohol, and the Baltic Sea made over half the class very very sick. Our boat was honestly crashing through giant chunks of ice. I have never been happier to get off of a boat, only to realize that walking around on land still felt like we were out on the Baltic. I thought this feeling would last for a few hours. I was wrong. The next day Tina and I were in a shoe store (obviously) when Tina suddenly grabbed my arm to steady herself and said, “Wow-it's a rough day at sea!”

Viking Mounds

Crazy tour guide

Smallest town hall in Sweden

Our cruise ship!

Crashing through ice

Taking advantage of the cabaret dance floor

Tallinn!

In Estonia we went to the Pirita Health Center. This was a general practioners office. Here we were given a lecture about what they did at the clinic and what an average day for a GP in Estonia would be like. We learned that women get 18 months for maternity leave after the baby is born, as well as 2 months before the baby is born. Women in the US would kill for 20 months of maternity leave. We then got a brief tour of the facility. It became immediately obvious that they focused on a lot of wholistic healing methods. They had magnetic therapy, water therapy, as well as a salt room (the walls, ceiling, and floor were made entirely of salt- it has never actually been proved, but it is widely believed that it helps people who have respiratory problems). Many of us still felt pretty sea sick during this visit, and one girl was literally green. After grabbing a quick lunch we went to the North Estonia Regional Hospital. From the outside it looked very rundown. When we walked into the lobby, Tina pointed out that it looked like the DMV. Our first impressions of this hospital were not great. Then we met the doctor that would be giving us a presentation and showing us around. He closely resembled Vince Vaughn, and if you know anything of my love for Vince Vaughn you can imagine that this academic visit immediately got 100% better and more interesting to me. He apologized for the initial appearance of the hospital and explained that it was under construction. When the architects were designing the areas to be renovated they asked for the input of the doctors in order to make the facilities as efficient to them as they could. The lobby area was designed so that it could be converted into an ICU if there was ever an emergency and the actual ICU ran out of beds. The operating rooms had giant glass windows, with counters that allowed the patients beds to be wheeled into and out of the operating room more efficiently. Vince Vaughn explained to us that although this doesn't seem like a big deal, in the long run it does save a lot of time. After leaving the hospital and checking into the hotel we went to a Medieval Restaurant for dinner. All of the workers were dressed in medieval clothing and we were served “medieval food” aka meat still on the bone as well as pigs tongue. Surprisingly the pigs tongue tasted alright, but the texture was disgusting. The bathrooms were also medieval-meaning that to wash your hands you had to physically tip over the kettle that contained the water. Naturally, I went into the boy’s bathroom because I didn’t notice the very obvious picture on the door of a boy peeing. I came back to the dinner table complaining to everyone about how I knew it was a medieval restaurant but there was no need to put a urinal in the bathroom. I’ve lost count of the number of times I have gone into the men’s bathroom, and I don’t think the list will end at this incidence.

Brand new operating room-they slide the beds over the table to get the patients in and out faster

Pigs tongue

A medieval urinal? Really?

This explains the urinal

Live entertainment

Tallinn is magical

On the last day we had a guided walking tour of Tallinn. The old town was very medieval in style. I wish we had a little more time there because it was such a cool city. Everything was so old. Afterward we were given free time, which was spent getting out feet warm (we had been walking through slush all day), eating, and then shopping. Estonia is known for its sweater market, which of course we all got sucked into. The homemade sweaters were gorgeous, and I can honestly say that two months later I have gotten a lot of use out of my sweater. It is the warmest sweater I have ever owned! I also bought knee socks that are quite warm. We then went to a little café that has been rated as having the “best hot chocolate in the world.” I can vouch for the fact that it was the best hot chocolate I have personally ever had. After that it was time to return to Denmark. It wasn’t until I had been away for a whole week that I realized how much I have considered Denmark my home. It was great to be back in Borup with my host family and to sleep in my own bed!