And we’re back for part 2! We went from Estonia to Finland in luxury, taking a quick 2.5 hour ferry and DIS included a full buffet with our ticket, and we definitely did not waste it! As we went along, we were able to spot some real-life seals and pups in the water, and though there were some Titanic vibes with the amount of ice in the water, but luckily we didn’t sink and I survived to tell the tale. After disembarking, we made our way to the hotel, and while some of the group explored Helsinki in the night, at least Youssra and I decided to stay in, and we ended up watching the riveting and Oscar-winning documentary Icarus on Netflix. (I highly recommend it!)
Wednesday:
Our first academic visit the following morning was to KELA, the social insurance institution of Finland, where we learned about the social security and health care systems of Finland. Pictured below is the library of the building, the contents of the “baby boxes” that new mother can choose to receive which have a plethora of resources for the beginnings of motherhood, and building’s cafeteria with sustainable heating! (Also pictured is our lunch we had post-visit, which was amazing!!!)
Our cultural visit was to a nearby church situated in rock, which made for lovely views, and then we saw Call Me By Your Name as a group!
Thursday:
Our second academic visit was to the Finnish Cancer Registry, where we learned about the cancer screening programs in Finland with a focus of cervical cancer. It was very interesting to see the ways in which disease prevention and health promotion is at work in Finland, in comparison to both the U.S. and Denmark, and see how we can implement these practices in other countries and in various health care settings. It really appealed to my passion for epidemiology and was my favorite academic visit from the whole week! After lunch on our own, we journeyed to a traditional Finnish sauna using public transportation, and I had such a wonderful experience. Though I had some experience due to the LLC Kickoff event, I was actually to go into the water this time! We went through 5 alternating rounds of hot (the sauna) and cold (literally the frozen lake), and it was exhilarating. The lake was ridiculously cold, but the combination of hot and cold made the whole experience more bearable and quite interesting. You know it’s the real deal when locals are there, and this sauna was the real deal. You could tell the non-Americans by those who were uber comfortable being naked in the sauna and who could handle sweltering heat. We noticed that whenever our large and conspicuous group would enter the sauna, the locals already there would add water to make the room significantly hotter. There were points at which it felt like my face would melt off, Raiders of the Lost Ark style. Luckily that did not happen and I made it to our concluding dinner where I had one of the most delicious soups I’ve ever had, though vegan gluten-free Youssra got lettuce for the first course. Seriously, just lettuce. After some advocating, Camilla got her some extra food, but it made for a humorous experience.
Friday:
Our last day in Helsinki and of the study tour overall started with a review of the material we’d learned over the week–complete with a Kahoot quiz, which I may or may not have won ;), and a traditional Finnish lunch of meat and potatoes (though Youssra got a sweet potato waffle and a bunch of yummy vegetables). We were then left to a few hours to explore Helsinki before our flight back to Copenhagen, and Youssra and I found a wonderful (and free!) museum of the city of Helsinki. There were exhibits of VR of the modern and old city views, Helsinki club history, overall city history, old photos, and much more! We also found vegan gluten-free nut-free cookies in the museum cafe which were a bit surprisingly nothing short of delectable.
Before we knew it we were heading back to Copenhagen and gearing up for another week and weekend of DIS! The week was full of lovely and diverse experiences, with hands-on visits and studies that make DIS so special and awesome! I’m still working on blogs from my many experiences this past month, so thanks for sticking with me; and there’s so much more to come so stay tuned! (For example, I’m currently finishing this up in a castle on the Czech Trek DIScovery trip.)
Alright guys: sorry for the post gap. The past 2 weeks have been a little crazy with travel and deadlines, but I have a lot coming so stay with me. I’m starting with my long study tour that I had 2 weeks ago. To put all the events from the week would be a very long post, so for the sake of my lovely readers’ eyes and my fingers, I’m breaking my trip to Estonia and Finland into two posts by country. I’m starting in chronological order with Estonia!
Sunday:
Our journey started in the metro to the Copenhagen airport to board our flight to Estonia. DIS makes traveling really easy, you juts get a flight confirmation number and you’re good to go–and with one checked bag! Everything’s pretty close in Europe, or at least it seems that way, so it was a short flight. I also got some stellar in-flight tea, thanks SAS!
Luckily after getting to our hotel we had nothing planned for the evening apart from dinner, so we got to explore a bit of Old Towne Tallinn and prepare for our week of events. (The gelato and waffle were amazing, and the price was a wonderful change from Copenhagen, at only 4 Euros!)
Monday:
Our academic visits started with time at the Estonian Health Insurance Fund, where we learned about how the Estonian health care is funded and administered throughout the country. Some fun facts I learned were that Estonia has only been an independent nation since 1991, and since it’s independence coincided with the emergent commonality of technology and the internet, much of the government and health systems are completely electronic. They also have a very generous maternity leave policy, partly to incentivize having children due to the rather low birth rate in Estonia! We then got to have a very Italian lunch before we were off to our first cultural visit.
After our very Italian lunch we had a walking tour of Tallinn, which was both cold and greatly entertaining. Our Estonian tour guide, Seem (not sure about the spelling), took us around the city center and told us about Tallinn’s fascinating history, including Soviet influence, Czech glass, and jean gangs believe it or not! The whole tour was a bit comical and cynical and our tour guide was really awesome, even though he shared some pretty depressing fun facts about Estonia at the end of our tour. (Apparently Estonia has some of the highest HIV rates in Eastern Europe and have a real problem with personal connection according to Seem.)
Then we were on our own again, and after some wandering and shopping we discovered an AMAZING–and cheap–vegan restaurant right in the middle of Old Towne. It was a really interesting experience, since the base menu was vegan but you could add meat to any of the options. It was a great place to accommodate our whole group between vegans, nut allergies, vegetarians, gluten-frees, good ol’ fashioned omnivores, you name it. There I had some traditional Estonian fish soup, Bailey’s, and earl grey vegan ice cream!
Tuesday:
Our next academic visit was to a family clinic to see how Estonian GP offices run. It wasn’t much different from other GP offices we had visited (though they did have some extra inexpensive special services like water and salt treatments), but it was interesting to see the different way they fit into the overall health care system. We moved on to the Estonian health care museum for our second cultural visit, which had awesome interactive exhibits on everything in health. We could have spent the whole day in there, but we had a ferry to catch. A small group of us had a quick lunch and then made our way to the water to travel to Finland!
I’ll dive into the ferry ride and my Finland adventures in my next post, so keep an eye out in the next few days. (Coming up after that: my trip to Berlin, another Singing Sunday, and my DIScovery trip next week to the Czech Republic.) As always, stay tuned and thanks for reading!
There is so much for me to talk about this week, so I’ll break it up day-by-day here. My Public Health core course took our short study tour this week to Western Denmark where we had rather early mornings to pack in lots of cultural and academic visits in Odense, Middelfart, Sorø, and Zealand.
Monday:
Bus viewsOdense was “out of this world”
We started out the week bright and early with a bus trip to Odense, on which we crossed the longest bridge in Denmark to make our way to our first cultural visit: making chocolate. Our class split up into two groups, and since our group was going second for the chocolate session, Ellie, Youssra, and I were able to grab lunch and wander around Odense for an hour or so. Youssra was able to find a vegan place with jackfruit barbecue, while Ellie and I went for standard pizza at an Italian cafe. Before we knew it, it was our groups turn at the chocolate shop, where we would learn to make a traditional Danish pastry called flødeboller (known to google as chocolate marshmallow treats) from an Icelandic pastry chef. We started by making the cream itself, then piping it out onto wafers, and then dipping the cooled product into warm chocolate, all with interspersed chocolate tastings between each step. It was much more difficult than I anticipated but the result was delicious and I kept eating them over the whole week!
We then visited the Odense University Hospital, where we met with a doctor and nurse who worked in the HIV clinic there. This, to me, was one of the most fascinating visits of the whole week. At Hopkins, I’ve had so many guest lectures on HIV in various public health courses (Clinical and Public Health Behavior Change, Fundamentals of Epidemiology, and Public Health Policy and Politics, to name a few), and I feel as though I’ve learned a lot about HIV in the U.S. and how we have approached it from a public health perspective. Hearing about statistics and strategies towards HIV/AIDS in Denmark was awesome for me to learn about and compare, and the presenters really focused the session on answering our questions, and not just presenting information to us. This allowed us to get a tailored session to our interests and I thought it was just a really great visit.
We finished the evening by busing to our hostel and then heading out again to dinner and a beer tasting, both of which were fantastic. The restaurant was really great about catering to our group’s many dietary restrictions and dinner was absolutely delicious. As for the beer tasting: I have never considered myself a beer fan, but they gave us a diverse assortment that had some tasty selections and the event allowed us to get closer to our classmates and teachers (being a little tipsy helps with that).
Understandably, we were all beat after the long day and the beer, so most of us went straight to sleep in preparation for our second day!
Tuesday:
The day started with this beautiful view from our hostel’s breakfast cafe:
We then departed on the bus to our second cultural visit: stopping by the Horsens prison museum. For those that don’t know, Denmark does things very differently than the U.S. in terms of prisons. There were some facts on the tour that I almost laughed out loud at. For one, they don’t really do life sentences. Sentences are at maximum typically 16 years. We hear in the U.S. of people getting multiple life sentences in prison or 100’s of years, and you just don’t see that in Denmark. In fact, in general sentences are much shorter here. One of my classmates asked our tour guide how long the sentence was for the prison we were touring, and she said “Typically this facility was for longer sentences, such as 2-3 years.”, which made most of our eyes bulge, given that 2-3 years is seen as a pretty light sentence in the U.S. Denmark also utilizes the idea of open prisons, where prisoners have more freedom and can have supervised and approved time outside of the prison. They may be able to get a job, visit family, or otherwise be involved in the community. Closed prisons more so resemble what we would expect in the U.S., which in Denmark is reserved for members in gang activity and those who cannot comply with rules in an open facility. The whole concept was intriguing, especially with the controversy that surrounds prisons in the U.S. and our problems with mass incarceration and poor reintegration efforts. While it would be likely infeasible to try and implement a system like open prisons in the U.S., there are aspects of Danish prisons the U.S. could learn from.
Prison-made bongs made of various materialsTypical prison cell
We then made our way to our academic visit to a general practitioner’s office in Horsens. It was very interesting to see the differences between how GPs function in America vs. Denmark. For the most part in Denmark, GPs act as gatekeepers to the rest of the healthcare system and are typically the first point of contact for patients looking for care. For most non-emergent situations, people must go through their GP for referrals to specialists and hospital care. This makes GPs a huge part of the Danish healthcare system. Hearing directly from a GP about the challenges, trends, and plain old nitty gritty of the position was a unique part of our field study and let ask direct questions about Scandinavian systems of care. It was a great complement to what we’ve been learning in class and provided context to general information about healthcare organization. It was also interesting because his practice was in conjunction with other GPs and specialists, sharing space and an organization with physical therapists, pediatrists, pharmacists, etc. This is relatively unusual in the U.S. for general practice, so it was interesting to see how the practice functions and with what efficiency.
We ended the day by taking a somewhat long bus trip to our hostel for the night in Middelfart (yes, that is the actual name), where we enjoyed snow, beautiful forest views, a game of thrones themed hall, and a buffet of awesome food for our last night outside of Copenhagen.
Wednesday:
Another early morning found us eating breakfast at our hostel with another lovely view, before heading out to Sorø for our cultural and academic visits for the day.
Our cultural visit was to the Sorø art museum, which had interesting collections ranging from the 1700’s to photography of the Russian revolution to the 1960’s. The art there was beautiful and thought-provoking and we had a great time.
We also had some free time before our group lunch at the Three King’s Cafe (which used to be a movie theater in the 30’s) so Youssra, Ellie, and I did a bit of thrift store shopping and walked to a nearby frozen lake and had a field day with pictures).
The exact moment I heard the ice crack
We then walked over to our academic visit for the day, Region Sjælland, where we had a lecture on organization and financing of healthcare in Denmark in the room where council members for the region meet and discuss issues in healthcare. I’m not gonna lie, it was probably the most difficult lecture of the week to get through, with it being a pure presentation with a less interactive style than the other visits (but we did have coffee and food which was nice!). We learned about concepts we had seen in class in much more detail, which was interesting and allowed us to build upon what we’d learned in class.
Before we knew it, we were back in Copenhagen and thoroughly exhausted but I loved seeing my housemates again. (See this very cute picture that was taken of us upon our reunion.)
Thursday:
Thursday just included a day trip, but still had quite an early morning. We took a bus to an emergency department in Zealand, which was one of the highlights of the week for a lot of people in my class, myself included. The presenter was super funny and engaging and took us on a tour of the department and answered any and all of our questions. One interesting thing about ERs in Denmark is that emergency medicine is not a specialty (though it’s currently on the way to becoming a specialty). Rather, emergency departments are typically made up of doctors and nurses in general or internal medicine. Denmark also tends to have less problems with non-emergent cases in ERs (likely due to gatekeeping nature of GPs and complete coverage of primary care in the universal healthcare system), an issue that can cause large increases in costs since hospital care is much more expensive than primary care. The Danish ER also helps coordinate and staff telephone lines for emergencies and non-emergencies, where people can call and describe their ailments and get advice from medical professionals on whether to visit an ER or not (as in wait to see their general practitioner). This is something that would be great to potentially see in the U.S. to cut down hospital and emergency room costs. In sum, it was amazing that a super busy ER doctor took 2 hours out of his schedule to talk to us and teach us and I feel like I got a lot out of the visit (and they gave us coffee and fruit, which was so nice of them–if you can’t tell, I’m a big food fan). Nothing else was planned that day, so it was nice to go back home and rest after the week.
Friday:
Core Course Week ended on Friday, starting with a regular lecture on inequality in health in Denmark, and then a guest lecture on childhood cancer and a workshop on formulating research questions which was really helpful for our final semester project (heads up my group’s project is comparing health systems), and finally a wrap-up and feedback session on the week! Though it took a long time at the end of a long and tiring week, the day was really helpful and we got out early for a good start to the weekend. It feels like I’ll be on my long study tour before I know it.
Now I’m off to finish studying for my test tomorrow–my first one at DIS. Yikes!
So this is gonna be a bit text-heavy, folks. Prepare yourselves. I haven’t talked a lot about academics at DIS and I had a super interesting week in my classes so I thought I would touch on some different ways DIS incorporates learning both in and outside the classroom. (Sorry if I nerd out a little, and I apologize for lack of pictures.) I’ll use this blog post to highlight 4 different awesome ways DIS facilitates learning that I’ve experienced just this week alone!
1. Field Studies!
As you may know, at DIS Wednesday’s are reserved for your courses’ field studies. What these trips look like is very different depending on the class. For example, some of my friends in the Danish Language and Culture class went on a field study recently to the Parliament building and the Danish History Museum here in Copenhagen. Meanwhile, my very first field study included going on a walking sex tour of Copenhagen for my Psychology of Human Sexuality class. If you’re intrigued and curious as to what a walking sex tour would entail, I was in the same boat. Our professor described it as a walking tour of the sexual history of Copenhagen, which wasn’t too much more illuminating. Though the day itself was a bit brutally cold and windy to be outside for 2 hours, it turned out to be a fascinating walk. Some hotspots of the tour were passing where the “public houses” (aka brothels) used to be that employed “public ladies”, the oldest pornographic shop in the world–which very sadly closed in the last month, and the Copenhagen city hall, which saw the first same-sex marriage performed in 1989. Our tour guide was very knowledgeable, who told us all about sexual policies and practices in Denmark from the 1600’s to today. It was great, because now I have a lot of fun facts I can bust out at parties! For one, from the early 1900’s to 1999, only 40% of income could come from prostitution, and in 1999 100% of income could come from prostitution. Also, in the 1600’s, double adultery (when 2 married people committed adultery with each other) was one of the worst sexual crimes. For the first 2 offenses, offenders were punished by being forced to proclaim their crimes publicly, and if there was a 3rd time, the punishment was death–yikes. It’s kind of funny how Danish policies 400 years ago were both harsh and lenient, offering second chances before capital punishment. All in all, it was a wildly interesting and unique field study and provided a really cool experience.
“Bryllupssal”, translated to “marriage hall”, where the first same-sex marriage took place in 1989
I also got the chance to have a mini field study on Friday for my Healthcare Strategies for At-risk Populations class. We went together to one of the roughest homeless shelters in Copenhagen, Mændenes Hjem, a men’s shelter that is known for its use of drug consumption rooms, where drug users can consume drugs in a safe environment with sterile equipment. It is situated on Istedgade, a street in Copenhagen famous for its red light district and drug environment. Our professor Camilla set up a meeting for us with a Danish social worker who works directly with the vulnerable populations at Mændenes Hjem. It was utterly fascinating to be able to relate what we have been learning in class about harm reduction to real life and people. Since in the U.S. we have been experiencing significant levels of drug abuse and overdose, it was illuminating to hear the extensive differences between Denmark and the U.S. in terms of most common drugs, circumstances that lead to substance abuse, and approaches to addressing the public health issue of substance abuse. For example, America has recently seen an epidemic of opioid abuse (our guest lecturer Rasmus stated that last year 65,000 Americans died of drug overdoses) that is partially attributable to pharmaceutical companies and the healthcare industry popularizing opioids for pain management, whereas Denmark seems to have a much larger problem with cocaine and heroin, apparently largely due to personal circumstance with trauma and abuse. While the U.S. focuses more on criminalization and punishment, Denmark has taken controversial approaches such as the drug consumption rooms mentioned earlier. People can inject or smoke whatever drugs they have without penalty in these rooms for up to 45 minutes, where trained medical staff can supervise and act if there are signs of overdose. Because of this, Denmark has seen drastic decreases of death by overdose, and even a decrease in general drug use. However, this kind of program requires governmental and police support, which may be difficult to achieve in the U.S. It is still fascinating, however to be able to learn about different public health practices across the globe and in comparison with the U.S. Field studies make this reflection and comparison possible, and are a huge and awesome part of DIS!
A simple Latin bar in the red light district on Istedgade
2. Independent Work
One of the things I was most looking forward to for this semester was my research opportunity with DIS. While my particular project is more unstructured than I anticipated, DIS is already providing me with extensive support in my research process. Not only is my research supervisor, My, always available to help me or give me advice, but the Science Research Practicum team is there for us as well, in holding workshops to help us develop specific research skills like scientific writing and referencing, helping us navigate deadlines and assignments, and providing the best snacks at meetings (I experienced Prince cookies for the first time this week and it was honestly a sort of spiritual experience). The work of research itself has been a little daunting and time-consuming, but nobody said international research would be easy! I feel like I’m becoming better equipped to perform research and work with my partners, supervisor, and institution to achieve interesting findings that hopefully will be helpful in the future of determining breast cancer factors globally. To future potential DIS-ers, if you’re interested in research are independently driven, I highly recommend looking into SRP!
3. Guest Lectures!
A staple of DIS academics is that the professors that teach at DIS do so part-time, as most work as experts in their fields in Denmark, and disseminate their knowledge on us naive Americans. Even still, occasionally we get further Danish input from guest lecturers who provide insight on specific topics. This week, in Healthcare Strategies, a Danish police officer came in to talk to us about how the police force here practices harm reduction and reaches young people. Since police in the U.S. are often at the center of controversy, it was very interesting to hear from another country’s police the differences in approaches to common problems with crime. (If you can’t tell already, I’m really into public health comparisons of the U.S. and Denmark.) He mainly discussed the Danish approach to educating young people about crime, outlining the timeline of informational sessions in schools according to grade level. For example, when children are young, they inform them about traffic rules and safe bicycling, then move to information about theft, social media (there’s currently a huge class-action lawsuit against more than 1,000 teenagers in a sexting scandal as a point against child pornography), and drugs and alcohol. His drive-home point was that in Denmark, the police tend to avoid the “don’t do ______” approach, but rather try to tackle misconceptions about commonalities in crime. For example, teenagers were likely to think that rates of ecstasy use in Denmark was ~70%, whereas the real percentage lies at 3%. Seeing that crime is not as common as one thinks may dissuade one from committing crime when under direct or societal pressure. It was really interesting to see how differently Danes tackle these issues among young people, which was a great part of hearing directly from a Danish police officer.
4. LLC Events
Living in the Public Health LLC isn’t all fun and games, even though living with these ladies and Balkiss is so much fun and honestly one of my favorite parts of DIS and Copenhagen. This week we had an awesome session that focused on the good qualities of breast feeding and supporting mothers, and how Denmark and other countries support women in a variety of ways. I won’t describe it all here, since I’ve gone on for quite a bit and y’all have had a lot of text to work through. My roommate, Sophie, wrote a great blog post about it, so check it out here! It was a fascinating talk and showed a lot about how we can support mothers and children on various levels of organization, which could help us address big public health issues.
Thanks for making it through and hearing a little bit about my classes and academics at DIS. I’ll have a ton to talk about in the coming weeks, so stay tuned and hej hej!
Something's (not) Rotten in the State of Denmark 