It has been a LOOOONG while because of last week's long study tour :D.
First, where I left off, was Wednesday, September 28:
Twas my first visit to Sankt Peder's Bageri (St Peter's Bakery), a local super cheap-super tasty-student discount pastry shop. I'd been resisting buying pastries up until now because 1) they are most certainly not healthy for you and 2) saving money for a special occasion. I caved. (Also, "super cheap" is a relative term--it is only cheap in comparison to other bakeries in Denmark. The average croissant is 15 DKK, about $3.00). I have heard a mountain of reports that this bakery had the best pastries (for cheap) and I firmly confirm this opinion.
The same evening, eldest host sister Louise was hosting a party in honor of her graduation for her colleagues, but it seemed fewer were coming than expected, so we got to go too! It was held at a fancy venue, a large conference-like room with a kitchen down the hall in a nondescript building. It's interesting that you can find these very nice party venues in such normal-looking buildings,. I believe the food was homecooked? Not sure, but there was caramel popcorn, curry shrimp soup, spinach tomato pesto pasta salad, broccoli and ham focaccia, pineapple ham pizza, carrot cake, apple muffin, ice cream, berry granola cobbler, AND her boyfriend Tim was playing bartender. Like normal social gatherings, people tend to associate with people they know. Unlike social gatherings in America, no one will even consider attempting to get to know a stranger. Yes, everyone goes around and introduces themselves to everyone, but it's like the American "How are you?" It's a meaningless greeting with no expected follow-up. But it was fun chilling with the other sisters, who also didn't know Louise's air traffic control colleagues.
On Friday, my bike broke down! (I'm so very sad when this happens--it feels like I am cursed). It is an old bike, and I was shifting my weight to the back end of the seat when the screw holding it in place snapped. But in the wake of such bad news, I decided to spend the evening with a new good friend Shuyao. She's an international student at an American college, so that's why she was able to attend this program. Anyway, she had never seen The Princess Bride, so of course it was a must, followed by 23 kronor pizza at a nearby cafe (they fold their pizzas!!!! I wonder why?). A very hyggeligt evening :D
Saturday was LEGOLAND!!!! Tis an amusement Park, with lots of LEGO sculpture exhibits but also lots of rides. Legos were invented in Denmark in 1964, so it makes sense to go to the original Legoland. There is an adorable minitown built entirely of Legos with Lego people and there are vehicles and boats that move! Most all of it is a replica of real places. In some of the restaurants, there is a maitre'd that slides in and out holding a tray of goodies. It all reminds me of Mr. Rogers and the trolley town at the end credits, except it wasn't Legos. Traveling around Legoland was like traveling around the world. They built parts of Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Sweden, Norway, Germany, Los Angeles with the Chinese Theater filming Bionicles, the JFK NASA space center, the Statue of Liberty, the Capitol, the Acropolis in Greece, Abu Simbel of Egypt, an Arabian palace, Mount Rushmore, etc, etc. As an amusement park, it's not the BIGGEST thrill-which makes it perfect for me. The biggest ride was comparable to an enlarged version of Six Flag's Cat and Mouse. It's also divided into "lands" like Disney World, where different areas are themed. They also have various statues/decorations made of Legos: in Pirateland, there is a naked pirate who's covering his front with a hat, but his backside is in full view :P. Haha, it was a very fun afternoon overall.
Sunday was bus bus bus. We boarded at 10 in the morning and would reach Berlin 5 in the afternoon. The middle was partly spent on a ferry to the German side of the Baltic Sea. During the 2nd half of the bus trip, we watched a movie "Life is Beautiful" It's an Italian movie with characters Guido, Dora, and Joshua, a family of Italian Jews suddenly faced with Nazi occupation. ALL MY CREYS. It was an extraordinarily super funny and sad movie with a happy ending. The bus took us straight to the Jewish Museum, designed by the same dude who did the Ground Zero memorial. Every aspect of the structure is very thought provoking: Garden of Exile reminds me of Inception, rows of grey buildings, I could just spend a good 15 minutes there walking and walking round and round, taking turns at a whim, and the Jewish Tower, which is a big, lofty empty dark space lit only by natural light through a tiny slit at the top, and you can hear faint whooshing from outside. Of course, it was followed by dinner at the museum restaurant: caramelized goat cheese salad, super super super melt at the poke of your fork beef brisket with potato and carrot stew, and apple cobbler for dessert. DIS feeds us well, and I'm glad to see that our expensive tuition returns well.
We stayed at the Transit Loft Hotel, where they fit 6 hospital-like beds into one large open room (~30 euro/night), acceptable bathroom (the shower requires constant pushing of the button, rather like some sinks and the hostels in Western Denmark, and this seems to be common in Europe). It is continental breakfast and the free Wi-Fi is marginally disappointing (it can only take 2 computers at once in the same room).
Monday morning: 1st the DDR museum. It's supposed to be an interactive exhibit showcasing life during the socialist era, but it was interactive in a rather lame way and very limited: opening cabinet doors and pulling out shelves to see/read the exhibits, sitting in a livingroom or car of that era. The museum size was also very small.
So we all finished looking and reading everything half an hour early and left. By "we" I mean a small group of friends. We walked further and found a flea market on a street branching from Unter Den Linden. It was nice window-shopping, and then we progressed to the Ritter Sport outlet store and bought cheap, brand-name, German chocolate (by cheap, I mean .89 euro for a 16 square bar that normally costs 12 DKK in Denmark). The cafe also allowed inventing of your own chocolate, but the process took 30 minutes so we just got the pre-made stuff :D.
A quick walk back brought us to the main street lined with souvenir shops. I paused by one of the stalls selling Russian Communist fur hats. I didn't realize they were bargainable, so I was going to walk away because I was only carrying 45 euro and was not going to spend 35 euro on a hat. The vendor, however, was very keen to have my business (1st customer luck) and somehow my reluctance turned into bartering strategy and I got the fur hat plus a marine green cap (the origami boat shaped kind) for 28 euro. Having thus spent a good amount of euro, I needed more just in case. Unfortunately, no banks were open! It was Reunification Day, celebrating the historical end of the separation between East and West Berlin (I also could not use an ATM b/c I foolishly believed I would not need extra cash and so didn't notify my bank BIG MISTAKE).
Anyway, the afternoon was a Fat Tire bike tour around Berlin. By the way, Fat Tire Bike Tours exists in Barcelona and Paris as well, and the Berlin one was very nice, so I highly recommend this company :D. Some of the sites we saw: Hitler's bunker (apparently Hitler requested to be burned in a pit so that no one could take his body, the Soviets found his skeleton and identified him by the decayed right jaw--he ate about16 bars of choco/day, and they conveniently didn't mention it to anyone else until they had gone wild goose chases around the world), Chkpt Charlie, parts of the Berlin Wall, Brandenborg Tor, and the Field of Stela. All of which are important sights to see if you ever visit Berlin :D
Afterwards was dinner at a tucked away restaurant Zur Letzten Instanz with supposedly traditional German food, which was a bitter salad, ground beef steak (rather like a large frikadelle) with crispy potato swirly things and carrots and greenbeans, and a crustless berry tart afterwards. Very delicious (excepting the salad). Then a concert at Berliner Dom. Berliner Dom is a very beautiful cathedral, but not the best place for a classical concert. The echoey acoustics ruined the pauses of the music and made for very noisy harmony. Also, the pieces chosen were not particularly ear-catching and the end result was that the poor L'orchestra de Sedici didn't sound impressive at all. Most of us slept. At the end, a group of us escaped to the TV Tower and enjoyed a late night snack on its rotating restaurant with a beautiful view of Berlin at night.
Tuesday morning: I began my search for a currency exchange. A sightseeing office told me to go to the train station (which Tripadvisor.com also advised), so I went to the AlexanderPlatz train station, where the ticket office advised the bank, so I went to Deutsche Bank, where the bank teller told me to go to the train station and seek a special exchange office (yellow sign). So after 15 min searching the train station, persistence was once again rewarded. I didn't realize Berlin had 3 types of trains: bus, street level tram, and underground AND aboveground S-bahn. Because the S-Bahn at Alexanderplatz was aboveground, part of the train station was aboveground in a huge building with lots of shops like an airport duty-free mall. That's where I found the Wechsel (money exchange). Still, I'm definitely going to call my bank next time, because the rate is cheaper and it's more efficient just to use an ATM.
Now armed with money, I could afford to enter the Pergamon Museum. LONG LINE. Dunno why it was so popular (although it did come highly recommended). Initially, I thought it was anticlimactic for a 5 euro student ticket. The audio tour was very interesting/informative, but I was short on time, so I skipped around. I got to see the Ishtar Gate (my goal) and also many other things I remember reading about and seeing in textbooks, so that was very exciting to relive history class, but I should have liked to spend a whole afternoon there. Then a quick walk/S train to Potsdamer Platz and the Sony Center. Beautiful modern architecture :DDDDD. The entire group had a scheduled lunch at Lindenbräu. It began with a tasty potato cream soup, and was unfortunately followed by a HUGE entree with pork hock and potatoes and sauerkraut and strange green paste. It was the most unpopular of all DIS-chosen restaurant food. People were disturbed by seeing actual animal anatomy, by the size, and by the hairy pork skin. I guess it's an Asian thing to be able to stand looking at recognizable food. It's also something that most Americans have never eaten or seen as food. American food is usually more processed.
Our lunch was immediately followed by an academic visit to the German Heart Institute: an overall nice specialist hospital place, very open and airy and well-lit compared to JHMI. The presenter had good information but went so quickly that a half hour presentation ended in 11 minutes, so he definitely received a lot of questions at the end. After a snack break, we were taken to see patients with an artificial heart system and then to the ICU (1 doctor per 8 beds, 1 nurse per 2 beds, not bad).
Afterwards we were left to our own devices----so we traveled to Kartoffelkeller for dinner. According to the Berlin Welcome card, this restaurant had a tantalizing beer garden (not exactly my kind of incentive) but I tagged along anyway. ALL POTATOES (as the name suggested). Personally, it was too much starch for my taste, the waitresses didn't really know English, the restaurant was 60% empty while the other waterfront restaurants were full (okay, it was ~80 m away from the water :P), they forgot what I ordered so they only brought it out after everyone else was nearly done. I had potato pancakes with meat/tomato/garlic, but it was really their imitation Italian pizza that was tasty (sampled someone else's dish). 11.90 euro for the dish, plus 4.80 euro for water, so not too bad, but without the 25% off from the Welcome Card, I don't think it would have been worth it.
Wednesday morning: very painful early wake up to get out of the hotel and off to the Center of Anatomy, a department within Charite Hospital. We had a mini lecture with the director, then off to the dissection lab to view actual dissected human corpses and organs. FUN! and interesting. He said that touching engages understanding and memory of the student, probably more instructive than staring at pics in a textbook. Their basic anatomy class is 1 year dedicated to the slow dissection of 1 human body per 8 students in a group. The instructor's job is less of how to dissect and more of check out what you've dissected.
A short break and it was off to the Medical History Museum. Of course, the focus was on medical history in Berlin itself, but also general progress in medicine like when anesthetics became available, how that really upgraded the surgery profession (used to be done by barbers), the unfortunate "medical" practices back when the knowledge pool was much smaller (mercury as a cure for insanity, inducing pus formation, etc, etc), and the progress of nursing as a profession. For those who might be vaguely interested in medicine, this is something extremely informative and not at all boring to see.
Then we were free to find our own lunch. My college roommate and her friend strongly advised visiting Mustafa's Gemuse Kebap. It was far out (jump on the S-Bahn to Mehringdamn), but super tasty. Too bad I only had 1 hour, and I was 3 minutes late back to the bus. Earned a good scolding, but hey, I was going fast as I could. There's a limit to how fast trains go. And Mustafa's was so popular I had to wait in line for 8 minutes. 3.90 euro for a foot long durum. Far surpasses the shawarmas of Copenhagen. It's funny that I assumed the entire process was only going to take 30 minutes. Ah well.
Then a LONG bus ride to Poznan, Poland, punctuated by watching a German movie Goodbye Lenin and The King's Speech. The German movie was well done, except I did want to sleep, but I couldn't (can't sleep with movie playing b/c their voices are actually interesting to listen to. Regular conversation I can sleep through). Unfortunate.
We ended up at the NH Hotel. 4 star. YESSSSS. The only downside is that free WiFi is only in the lobby, and that you have to ask the front desk for a passcode that expires in 30 minutes post usage, so then you have to go ask for another. WHY??? I don't know. A quick decamping and we were off to dinner at Pod Pretekstem. They already had appetizer waiting (fried ham calzone-like sandwich with green onions), followed by rather dry chicken cordon bleu with green beans, carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, and slightly toasted potato wedges. The dessert was also slightly dry apple tart (with a crust!) topped with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. If not for the dryness, I would recommend this place, because the venue is especially quaint and cozy, with blush red textured walls, high arch ceilings with peacock paintings, columns, etc. Very comfycozy to sit in. Then I returned to the hotel for a long shower in a luxury bathroom that I will not have for a while.
Thursday morning: late wakeup--breakfast buffet YES
My group was off to the Gynecology Department of the Poznan University Hospital--we rode the tram (simple train system like Berlin).
Let me take this opportunity to applaud the train system of Berlin and Poznan. THERE'S ONLY 2 or 3 ZONES! Denmark has several tens of zones, some of which don't make sense (I think I ranted about this in another entry). So there.
We went round and round in a tour of the 120 yr old hospital building (new section for outpatients). They don't turn anyone away (how can you turn away a woman in labor??) so they sue gov't at end of year for overflow costs and the beginning of the next year the gov't pays them back. We also got to practice a pelvic examination, spoke to a woman waiting to give birth, and a woman with 10 hr old baby.
Then lunch at Pod Koziolkami, a cellar restaurant in Old Market Square with traditional polish food: begin with beet soup (a little too vinegary for me) and sour cream carrot salad, then breaded chicken with potatoes and carrots, BUT we had to leave early w/o dessert b/c it was taking some time to serve and we had to catch our walking tour. Many of my fellow students were disgruntled.
Poznan's sightseeing is mostly old buildings, such as the town hall and basilica minor and remnants of wall fortifications, otherwise Poznan does not have much to show for itself. Afterwards we went to a cafe called Cacao Republic, our tour leaders treating us to one drink and one snack each as compensation for lost dessert. I ordered Classic hot choco and this polish dessert called a Halvah--a biscuit/cake thing that was too grainy for me, but the hot choco was extremely concentrated and therefore very tasty.
The evening was again left to ourselves, so we visited the mall Galeria Malta, since we heard shopping is cheap in Poland. Shopping in a mall is NOT cheap. Prices are just like in the US. The only cheap thing in Poland is FOOOOOOOD (which I will demonstrate later)
After the mall, a friend and I went to another restaurant in the Old Market Square, entitled Fenix. Very well to do place. I had a breadbowl with bacon/egg/cream soup inside (reminiscent of Panera bread and equally as tasty) and a choco cake with ice cream and raspberry sauce, all for the grand total of $10 (including tax and junk). See how cheap food is???
Friday: the day began with the Pediatrics, GI department, which was noticeably less interesting b/c the tour was mostly standing in one place and talking about what goes on, examples of patients, etc, etc. The other problem was that we were all lacking sleep (who doesn't lack sleep when waking at 5:45 am?)
Therefore, I treated myself to browsing the souvenir selection at the Old Market Square, where we witnessed the headbutting of the goats at noon (statues on the town hall clock) and the legendary bugler. The story of the bugler is that one day long long ago, a bugler found a injured raven. Being the good hero that he is, the bugler nurses the raven back to health. What do you know? The raven is actually a dwarf king who thanks the bugler for his help and promises to return that help in the future. He tells the bugler to blow his horn in all four directions to summon this promised help. Then the dwarf king flies away. Some years later, Poznan is about to be invaded by a huge army. The bugler blows his horn in all 4 directions. Suddenly, the air grows black with a million ravens, who descend upon the army and frighten/peck them to submission. Henceforth, all the Poznan noon buglers blow in all 4 directions for the sake of tradition.
For lunch we found very well-to-do restaurant called Chatka Babuni, dedicated to "Grannie's pierogies," which are essentially dumplings. Who came first? Dumplings or pierogies? Considering Chinese civilization originated long before Western Europe, I put my money on dumplings. 9 delectable pierogies (and they are filling!) plus sauce plus salad mix plus a small tip came out to $7. FOOD IS CHEAP!
Haha, afterwards, the tour leaders held a wrap up in which they brought famous Polish pastries called marcińskie rogale, which is essentially a croissant filled with a fruit/nut/raisin paste. Unless you like that sort of thing, the paste was not the best part… but it certainly was an experience. That was followed by a trip to Lech Brewery: learning the process of brewing beer is not exactly necessary for life, but it was very hypnotizing to watch the bottles go round and round, from cleaning to filling to capping to labeling to boxing. And then they provided us beer samples. I don't like beer, unfortunately. So instead I looked forward to the last DIS provided supper at--ironically--Brovaria (Polish for brewery). It began with mushroom cream soup, then grilled marinated duck leg with pickled cabbage and 2 mantou (Chinese styled steamed bread). I om-nommed the bread (missed chinese food), followed by cheesecake filling inside a real cake, with drizzled raspberry sauce and decorated with kiwi and clementine slices. A very mouthwatering end to a splendid trip.
A looooooooooong bus ride home. I kept switching sleeping positions, and at one point had my head near the aisle. The bus turned and the leftover pastries from the overhead compartment fell and bopped me on the head. I think no one was awake to hear my yelp. The poor pastries lay scattered on the ground. Ah well, they weren't too tasty anyway.
We returned Saturday morning and the rest of Saturday was spent in exhausted catching up of homework.
Sunday: it happened to be other host sister Cecilie's bday partay with homebaked rolls and raspberry jam topped with cheese (OOMMMMMNOMMMM) and carrot cupcake and cheescake-ish fondant birthday cake. So much starch and sugar haha. And of course the Danish flag was everywhere. Fun times.
It's finally cold---got stuffed nose again >.< and had to pull out my big woolen coat for the 1st time. Too early, if you ask me. In fact, the cold weather has already put me in the Christmas mood :D.
Now I am tired. Blogging takes a lot of time. And I have hw...and 3 papers to write.
Night night >.<
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