I think I'll stay here forever!

It was so hard to get any sleep on the nine hour plane ride to Germany from Dallas. After many hours of waiting, we finally made it to Bonn on July 1^st. Our host family doesn’t own a car because the public transportation in Bonn provides a practical way of getting anywhere your heart desires, which isn’t true where I’m from at all. Since Cassie and I had a lot of luggage, we took a taxi to our house. A car that would not stop backing up when we clearly had nowhere to move to almost hit Cassie. When the taxi did arrive, the driver started speeding off before I even closed the door. After all of the commotion with the taxi, the driver finally pulled up to our house. Our host family is incredible and I could not have asked for a better location to stay at in Bonn. Our host dad now calls us the “ice girls” because the first night we had dinner we asked for ice. Every time we sit down for a meal he will run and get us ice for our drinks.  You never know refreshing ice-cold water is until there’s no AC and it’s scorching hot in Germany.

German classes have been much more difficult than I anticipated. The words perfectly pronounced in my head sound so completely wrong when they come out of my mouth. We’ve only had two lessons with Hilde so far so hopefully I can get better at German before I leave. I feel so bad when I go into restaurants and I can’t speak their language. The first day I had lunch here part of our group went to get pizza. Romana pizza sounds perfectly safe right? Except that it had anchovies on it. After hesitating and letting Kasey make sure it was edible, I tried it. It still tasted amazing even with that one special ingredient!

Unfortunately for my own health, I got to experience German medicine first hand as a patient today. I have a history of stress fractures due to the many miles I run each week. Apparently the beautiful morning run along the Rhine was too much for my foot to handle. A very nice, lifesaving German student worker from the AIB took me to the doctor this morning. Then she sent us to get X-rays from the “Radiologie” office, which happened to be a long walk across town. The radiologist was so shocked that I went hiking up the mountain yesterday to find the Drachenfels Castle and the surrounding ruins. The sight was well worth it though! Then we had to go report back to the original doctor and get pain medicine just in case I needed it. The whole process took around two and a half hours but I didn’t have to pay anything out of pocket besides prescriptions.

Learning about how the German healthcare system is set up compared to the other models around the world was fascinating in Dr. Wasser’s first lecture. It’s amazing how much I don’t know about other countries and I can’t wait to keep learning about the history of medicine. We have so many excursions planned for us over the next month in Germany and I’m just afraid that the time will go by too fast. I already know that I won’t want to leave Europe at the end of the program!