German Children Won’t Stop Talking To Me

Day 19 I spent the morning running around Bonn trying to make sure I was ready to fly to Spain, and the afternoon I spent on a discount flight watching a very drunk bachelor party give the flight attendants hell. A constant flow of alcohol on the flight led to a massive game of musical chairs, dancing in the aisles and very obscene gestures to the female attendants. How they weren’t all arrested, I’m not sure. On the bright side, the taxi ride through Palma was out of a dream, blue sky, tall palm trees and gentle mountains rising in the distance. As soon as I stepped though the hotel room doors, my brain stopped functioning at the cerulean waters washing on the shore. Sam and I decided a nice dinner was in order and spent 2 hours watching the beach goers and dining on octopus. That night, the ocean lulled us to sleep.

Determined to treat this weekend as low key as possible, we set our latest alarm yet at 9am and ate a leisurely buffet breakfast once we dragged ourselves out of bed on Day 20. Our boat excursion wasn’t until 3:30, so we hit the beach and started to soak up the sun. I attempted to be a better human and applied sunscreen, even though it gave me the most awkward tan lines. After a quick fiasco trying to get a taxi, we made it to the launch pier and surprise, surprise, was joined by a bachelor party (or maybe even 2, hard to tell). They were at least less rowdy, or maybe not drunk yet. Cruising through the blue waters under a warm sun made me step back and realize that an opportunity like this might not come for again for quite some time. So few people get to travel and even less get to come to a gorgeous, Mediterranean island. The 5 hours on the water exhausted Sam and I, sleep came easy that night and we again set a late alarm.

Day 21 was devoted solely to the beach and I decided to forego any sunscreen, cue the sunburn on my torso. Not the worst I’ve had but I’m paying for it now because it itches so bad. The day was uneventful until we grab  
dinner at a South African restaurant, where I found out that meat from ostrich is more like beef than chicken, but still as tasty as either.

A quick breakfast and taxi ride later had us on the flight home to Bonn, and the amount of relief of seeing/hearing German again is  
unimaginable. The rest of Day 22 was spent in peace at my host house, eating a late lunch and dinner, reading on the patio or chatting with my host mom.

Day 23 had poor Emily running on less than 4 hours of sleep and the both of us dragging our feet to the train station. Today was the visit to the university hospital to watch surgeries, and although it was an incredible opportunity, not much was able to wake our brains up. The first one I watched was an infant with a dislocated hip. The actual surgery took 5 minutes but the time surrounding it was slow (and unfortunately boring) to the point that I gave up when they started putting on the cast. After a trip to the break room, I was pointed in the direction of a laparoscopic 

removal of a mans’ prostate. The anesthesiologist was very friendly and the surgery more exciting for the sole reason that it was up on a TV screen allowing us to watch the procedure. I ended my day at the hospital but standing for 2 hours looking over an open heart surgery, the man getting a bypass and a new valve. I came hours after I had started and left hours before they ended, I can’t imagine how the surgeon stood there for that amount of time.

The day has come for our last German lecture, and good natured Hilde led us through a few worksheets before ending with a game of Guess Who. I’ll miss her but not the German. Dr. Wasser’s lecture about German, UK and American health systems illuminated even further how broken the US is in how we run our country. Germany has the Bismark model where employers and employees pay into the government run health care, so that if anyone, and I mean ANYONE, walks into a clinic in need of help, they walk right out after seeing a doctor with no premiums or co-pays. The UK has the Beveridge model where all citizens pay high taxes but they can all walk in and out of doctor offices with no money exchanging hands. The US unfortunately is a mashup of both along with our own brand of capitalism thrown in so that the insurance companies get richer and keep their stockholders happy. The way Wasser put it in perspective is that “Tiny Tim had no health insurance”. After class was a major change of pace, we went to an organ maker who walked us through the process of making an organ and the inner functionings of it. 

I’m allowed 1 week of rest and no traveling, sleeping in has never sounded better.