from left to right: United Nations flag, City flag, National flag, State flag, EU flag
Robert H. looking through my apple juice glass
In front of the lion and pig statue
Our first class was history of medicine, where we covered "the Grandeur that was Rome" and the major medical advances that came with that era. Apparently there was a lot of accomplishments in that time period as we filled up the entire hour and 15 min with info about the two different factions of treating diseases and all the ways that some of what was said ended up being wrong even though the writers were known as the best physicians of their time. Unfortunately, I think that my rushed morning made the class a lot harder as I started to fight to stay awake at about the 1 hour mark and resorted to doodling on my desk to stay focused.
After that class was lunch. Instead of going out and buying "now" food, me and some friends went out to get "future food" to get food stocked for lunches in the future. I got two packs of 6 rolls (35 cents each!) and a stick of salami so I could make sandwiches. Then came Physiology, which was a mix between lecture and lab, though the lab was just Wasser telling us the basics of the device we'll be designing for Otto Bock (it'll be simplifying a below the knee prosthetic) and telling us that there will be extra reading to make sure we fully understand what it is we're treating. Again, I was struggling to stay awake at the end, which was really upsetting because it was about the heart and the cool things that it does, which I find really interesting.
After our last class, we decided to switch around the desk situation. We tried a lot of different formats, but in the end I don't know which one we ended up using because I left before we decided. See, today is my host mom's birthday, and I was already later than almost the rest of the family that was showing up, so I left to join the party. When I showed up, all the immediate family was there and I was introduced to all of them before being urged to sit down, eat some cake, and drink some tea. Now, the thing about this family is that most of them don't speak English, so most of my time was spent trying to pick up various words and figure out the gist of what they were saying. To my surprise, I succeeded in following almost a whole conversation. The family friend was saying that Germany must be much different from the US, and learning German was hard from being and English speaker. The father pitched in and said that doing the opposite was just as hard and when he went to the US, he had to ask "please speak slowly." At that point, I turned to him and said, "ja, langsamer bitte," making them all laugh as I had basically repeated back what he said, but in each others native language.
Soon after that, most of the family left, but new people started to arrive, mostly friends and neighbors. It was actually quite fun, and the dinner was served during this portion of the night, a delicious chilli with bread and multiple bread spreads. Everyone was talking and laughing over the jokes and stories that were being told. Well, except me as they were all talking in Deutch and I don't understand it at that level yet. After the plates had been taken away, my oldest host sister's boyfriend Robert sat next to me and started talking to me...in English! It turns out that he had spent some time in the US (Chicago) working for a company and knew English pretty well. He even spent some time in China where he didn't know the language and so knew exactly what I was going through. We talked about why I was in Germany, where I had been, where I was planning on going, what he had done, where he was working, just about everything that came up. Eventually food came up and he asked me what my favorite German food was so far. I couldn't quite remember the name, but I knew what it started and ended with, so after a bit of time we found out what it was, fleischpflanzerl. Yes, confusing, but it was this patty of meat in a wonderful sauce served with potato salad, and completely delicious. It turns out that this was the Austrian way of saying the dish, which was actually a fairly common German dish called frikadelle.
By this point I was practically falling asleep because I had been concentrating so hard on trying to understand and decipher what was going on for so long before hand (almost 4 hours). I played with Marie and her stuffed animals for a little bit after everyone left, but soon it was obvious I needed to at least get ready for bed even if I wasn't going to go right to bed (I still have to write this blog.) When I got upstairs and logged onto skype, I found my Nana and Poppop had been trying to reach me for the last day or so, so I called them back and talked with them. It was great to actually talk to them again, and I'm looking froward to more conversations with them in the future. Tomorrow's another early day for me with Physiology at 8:45 and goes to 1 with classes (woo...) Hopefully I'll do better tomorrow and not start falling asleep in the middle of class.
Wish me luck!
Erin Z.
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