Lists: Things I Bought that I Love

Time for something lighthearted. My newest blog obsession is the Secret Society of List Addicts where contributing bloggers make lists. Their lists are funny, honest, and touching. I particularly liked People From My Past that I Regularly Googlestalk and Boys I Totally Crushed on for Years Even Though They Were  Unattainable (And Totally Wrong For Me) and wanted to try my hand at such lists. But I decided that it's a bad idea to make my own version of these because this blog is TMI as it as and because with facebook, you can find out the names of everyone of these boys. They would probably be freaked out and you'd think I'm weird. So I'll stick with this safe one.

Things I've Bought That I Love

My new bed

It's my first big girl bed (read: not twin size). I really like it and I get the whole thing to myself. At first it was like I was swimming unmoored in the sea but now I like being sprawled out. 

 Bed: post-assembly, pre-linens.

Pentax K-x camera

Sure it was a brick around my neck when I traveled in Europe. But I've taken at least ten good photos with it. Even one good one makes it all worth it. Too bad I won't have time to take it for walks now that i'm in Medical School. 

My camera, while waiting for a bagel in Amsterdam

The Ishtar Gate at the Pergamon Museum

Northface Recon backpack

North Face brand anything is expensive but my backpack has held up nicely through biking across MSU, stuffed to the seams on Ryanair flights crisscrossing Europe, two transatlantic flights and medical textbooks. And it reminds me of Europe every time I use it now.

White purse with multicolored embroidered flowers

Things you buy are worth it if it's really expensive but you use it a lot, decreasing cost/wear. But you know their real gems if they're cheap and you still use it all the time, like this purse I have. It's the Rorschach test of style. I've been told it looks hippie, modern, and Polish-people-from-the-mountains. Because the flowers are different colors, it matches everything. It was from the clearance bin at Kohl's, that paragon of lower-middle class consumerism. 

Black and white dress for 40 Danish kroner ($7)

This and the purse mentioned below are the best purchases from Studenterhus' secondhand bazaar, where Danish (mostly) college students (actually mostly girls) sell their used H&M and equivalent clothing. Very cheap and pretty trendy. If you've seen my weird tanlines around my neck and shoulders, you have this dress to thank. I love it because it doesn't wrinkle and makes me look really skinny.

Brown purse for 100 Danish kroner ($18)

So the secondhand bazaar sells used apparel, but this Esprit purse was brand new with tag for only $18. I was frequently seen wearing above mentioned dress and this purse when I traveled to warmer climes. It's especially good because I can fit my dslr case into it. I will cry the day the strap breaks, which it's already starting to.

more photos by my trusty k-x: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rainbow11soda/

Budgeting time

I had a viola teacher in middle school who gave me the following rule about practicing my viola: You practice every day that you eat. He meant that if you were ill, and thus had no appetite and could not eat, you could take the day off.

At the time I never followed his advice, but these words came back to me this past week as I try to re-orient my lifestyle to the relentless pace of medical school. I'm still don't know how many leisure activities I can allow myself.

Should I take 1 hour go to DSW this weekend to buy boots? No. I'm trying a new line of thinking: If you find that you need something from the store, wait a week anyway. That goes for clothes, groceries, random stuff for the apartment. I hope it works.

All sorts of people -- faculty, administrators, fellow students, second-year students -- have been giving us advice about studying. But in the end, none of them are that helpful. A professor told us that we must study everyday. He specifically used football Saturday as an example of what we should not do. He said that we can't wake up early to tailgate in the morning, watch the game in the afternoon, go to the bar in the evening. Those days are gone! Oh wait, I never did those things in one day anyway. But for me it translated into checking facebook less and blogging less.

But some students say that it's not THAT bad. A second-year told me to take one night off a week. Don't study that night. But that confuses me somewhat too. Should I count Thursday night as my "break" night? I'm not studying much on Thursday anyway. On Thursday I already have class from 8am to 8pm, with an hour lunch break and breaks between classes of at most 15 minutes. I'm really just going home to get ready for bed. I feel a little cheated of my supposed free time if I count it as my "free night".

A fellow student, when asked about hobbies, replied that she reads every night before going to bed. I actually checked out a book from the library that I plan to read for 10 minutes everyday. This means I probably won't remember the beginning of East of Eden or The Unbearable Lightness of Being by the time I've reached the end. But I hope I can get some reading one this way.

I can't remember the last time 10pm or 10:30 was my cue to get ready for bed. I get up at 6:30am now and I need at least 7 hours of sleep to function at all the next day.

Lastly, I will make an effort to blog once a week. See you next week.

On the Eve of Medical School

I just uploaded onto facebook photos of my white coat ceremony that happened earlier today. After finishing uploading, I flipped through the photos. I seemed to me that that I looked older and more mature in those photos than the image I have of myself. Maybe it's the short hair, the smartly cut dress, or the (albeit short) white coat. Or maybe it's that in my mind, I know that it's the beginning of a formidable commitment.

Transitions

As popular and fun to read as travel writing is, it was never my intention for this blog to be a travelogue. I intend to update regularly but everyone in medical school tells me this will consume all my leisure time.

You may have noticed the new title of my blog. The end of my time in Denmark made me feel that that experience was fleeting, thus the previous title. But now I'm embarking on four years of medical school where the body is the subject of study. I think it also encompasses my interest in the body in society, in politics.

Today I had the first of a week-long medical school orientation. Immediately I was reminded of a similar experience, the orientation program for Aarhus University exchange students. The people I met my first day at Denmark Today, at the very first activity, became my friends for the rest of my time. So perhaps the same will happen now. We'll see.

Travels: Toilets

This is a restroom at Warsaw.  Circle = female. Triangle = male.  Yes, I was puzzled when I first heard about these signs on a travel forum and then I saw one with my own eyes at the National Museum in Warsaw.

Every country I got to seems to have slightly different restrooms.
First, there's the matter of what we even call them. European non-native English speakers call it toilet. It's also the word written on signs for public restrooms. This sounded vulgar to me at first but then I too started to call restrooms toilets.

Then there are the stalls. But all European restrooms "stalls" aren't stalls because the toilets are separated from the adjacent toilet by solid walls -- yes that go all the way up to the ceiling and down to the floor.That "foot-tapping" scandal involving some politician (or was it an evangelical preacher?) wouldn't happen in Europe.

Danish restrooms are unique for having er ... feminine hygiene product disposal bins that are just plastic bags suspended by a piece of metal attached to the wall. I didn't see these anywhere else except, I think, Norway.  Like so:

It's also very common in public restrooms and bathrooms at home to have two water levels for flushing, indicated by the bigger and smaller buttons. Oh I almost forgot! The fact that the flush is operated by a button ABOVE the toilet is different from the States too.

I'll also never forget a discussion among members of bidet using cultures (two Italian and Turkish friends) and non-bidet using cultures (me).

I could detail the restrooms I've seen all over Europe but I'm flying out to SoCal very early tomorrow morning. This also means no new blog posts for about another week.

Travels: Girls and Boys in Denmark

During my last days in Århus, I went to Legoland, probably the most famous Danish tourist attraction after the Little Mermaid statue. At the Legoland gift shop you can buy Lego sets, spare Lego body parts, and these silicone ice cube trays.

Legoland gift shop. July 2010.

The gendering of toys is a worldwide phenomenon, it seems. Even in Scandinavian countries with some of the most impressive levels of gender equality in many areas. It's also a popular subject of Sociological Images, a sociology blog. It runs a series on gendered toys and used this Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal webcomic as illustration of childhood socialization via boys and girls toys.

(source)

A window in Copenhagen. February 2010.

Wrap up: Time and Place

 I've been back in the States for three weeks. It feels much longer, like I've been here all summer. This surprised me. I thought that I would feel more reverse culture shock, that Ann Arbor and East Lansing would feel more foreign. I thought that I would feel uncomfortable driving my car again. I thought the American hypermarts would overwhelme me. I thought I would cringe at American-accented English.

The first three to five days, I felt this way. I wanted to find all the foreign things I had in Europe. Trader Joe's 100% Rye Bread is a close approximation of rugbrød. At a restaurant in East Lansing I had Zywiec beer.

At the same time as the discomfort, however, these were also glorious days of rediscoveries. I finally got a fragel, which I wanted to do the last day before I left in January but the store was closed for the holidays. So I fulfilled a wish I had maintained for six months.

By the time first weekend was over -- I came back on a Monday -- it felt like I had been here in Ann Arbor all summer, which begins for most American college students in early May.

This doesn't mean I've forgotten about Denmark. The opposite: I think about Denmark and Erasmus all the time. Like I've said many times before, those six months were the greatest six months of my life. The people, the traveling, the just hanging out in Århus. But I'm not raving about it to everyone the way I thought I would. I feel like I've entered a different chapter of my life. Denmark exists in memories. For the people I met on Erasmus, we're all post-Erasmus now and that's the way it must be. I feel that if I keep talking about Denmark and exchange that I'll start to have Peter Pan syndrome. As much as I would like to go back to Denmark, I can't because by "Denmark" I mean both a place and a time. Maybe sometime in the future I'll go to Denmark but we've all moved beyond that time to new endeavors.

My train from Århus to Copenhagen airport as it passed Copenhagen central station. July 12th, 2010 approx.12:30am