Tonight REM was playing at an outdoor venue in Dresden. Everyone went down to the riverside, close to the stage, to listen (for free). It was really nice- they were playing close to the old city, and when the sun set the buildings were lit and it was very pretty. Also REM played night swimming in their encore, my all-time favorite REM song.

I am really proud to be a Canadian today.

Jackie's Brazilian-Themed Weekend Misadventures in Prague

Introducing the participants...

1. Clarissa- the Brazilian Exchange student in Dresden

2. Jaa-nai-ee-na (not really how you spell it, but how you pronounce it)- another Brazilian exhcnage student who is starting her placement in Holland soon. She took the train down to Prague for the weekend.

3. Paolo- the third brazilian exchange student, doing his placement in Prague

4. "the Russian"- another exchange student with a name so foreign that no one could pronounce it. He was officially referred to as this title both in public and to his face. I later started to think of him as "the mentally- unsound Russian" because it became apparant that he either had a case of Touretts or (more likely) some other neurological deficit that was more subtle, because the things this guy did were bizarre. From yelling at top voice "AHHHH!" when we were all on a hill, to touching everything on the tour of the Prague Castle (including clearly labelled items saying DO NOT TOUCH as well as all of the guns on display) - he was one strange dude.

5. And me.

We began the trip on Saturday morning- I biked to Clarissa's apartment in Dresden because it became apparant that we weren't able to effectively communicate through hotmail messages. It is very, very frustrating trying to organize a train departure when you have to check your email every five minutes to discover whether the person knows the time, train station, etc. We took the train 2.5hours to prague (with a quick backpedalling back to Clarissa's apartment to get her passport- " do you think I'll need it?" she asked? I told her about the stamp-happy border officials that are on every former communist country and we returned back to the flat.)

Arriving in Prague, we walked around the old city, across St Charles Bridge, and then to the Castle. At around 6pm we decided we could walk to her friend Paolo's hostel. But we didn't have a map, thus we went to the metro, memorized one of their maps (so we thought) and then set out on foot. Somehow we ended up behind the castle walking in the woods- foothigh in poison oak. The last straw was when a Czech policeman appeared and started yelling at us for tresspassing. We clearly needed to backtrack. So after an hour's walk, slightly itchier, we went back to the same metro stop and RECHECKED the map. Turns out there was a metro line running right to his student hostel. Oops.

So we got to his hostel, which followed the laws of all Eastern European hostels, which are:

1. They are way-the-hell away from the city centre, usually involving 2 or more forms of public transportation to get there.

2. They are converted communist workers houses, with no renovations or upgrades having been done since approximately 1953, giving it that "authentic soviet feel" that I was looking for.

3. They are run by two old Omas who speak the local language and nothing else and whose solution to communicating with english/french/german/italian guests is to wake up one of the guests who speaks this language and their language and get them to be a bleary-eyed translator.

4. They are in an area very far away from food, or anything resembling food. You want food and the best you'll be able to do is some sort of soviet ration bar from the vending machine.

But all was well. We stayed for free thanks to Paolo and his wooing of the front-desk Omas.

The next day we went to see a castle in suburban Prague. This is where we met the Russian, who for some reason unknown to me, went shirtless for a good part of the morning. His shirt was in his hand. And it was 15 degrees and drizzling.

Anyway, we spent the day in this suburb, and then took the train back into the city, where we only had a couple hours to look at the Communist Museum. It was cool. They showed old TV footage of the Velvet Revolution and a bunch of Soviet propoganda posters.

And now I'm back in Dresden. I have never been more relieved to enter a german speaking nation- at least I understand some German- the Czech language was a complete mystery.

Today I did an EKG on someone. For the first time. We talked all about it in school, but I've never actually put the electrodes on someone and had it read anything.

Now that I've been doing all this stuff with IVs (well, doing, you know, maybe observing is a better term) I've become fascinated with people's veins. Especially on their arms. I found myself checking out some guy's arms today, fascinated by the endless bulging veins that I could put IVs into. Weird.

The American film institute has compiled a list of the top 100 most quotable movie quotes. Of course, the number one choice was "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn." But some of the other ones were really funny...

#10- "you talkin' to me?" Robert DeNiro- Taxi Driver
#8- "may the force be with you." Harrison Ford- Star Wars
#27- "I'll be back." Arnold- Terminator
#64- "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the war room!" Peter Sellers- Dr Strangelove
#77- "Soylent Green is people!"-Charlton Heston- Soylent Green
#100- "I'm the king of the world!" guess who...

and the best one, #82- "Toga, toga!" John Belushi, Animal House.

Well. The weekend was certainly something. It kicked off on Friday night with the start of Bundesrepublik Neustadt- the street festival. No burning cars, but lots of police in riot gear, just in case. I went over to one of the German's apartments- and met the international community of Dresden. It seems to be a popular place to spend a year or two. Lots of kids from around the world- several from Spain and Italy, two from Czech republic, one from Mexico, one from India, and one from Japan. They were all studying here- and their German was definitely better than mine (I'm going to attribute that to the fact that most of them have been in Dresden for over a year.) The Festival kicked off after dark- it was very full- lots of people walking around and drinking, with lots of bands everywhere- it actually reminded me a bit of Puerto Veurta. You could buy beer everwhere, as well as "Bohne" which was wine mixed with fruit juice. There was also an excess of punks. I have never seen so many mohawks in my life. Stayed up until 3am that night walking around and talking to people, as best I could. The whole thing continued over the weekend, with the days being oriented towards kids. Because the apartment that I'm staying at is right in the middle of the festival, I felt justified in staying up late. (It would have been too hard to sleep with all of the techno, anyhow.)

This weekend there's a big festival in Dresden- when I asked my hosts what it was like, they said, in all seriousness- 'well last year there were a lot of burning cars.' And then 'do you know how to make a Molotov Cocktail?' Ho-o-o-o-o-okay. Although they did say that last year there were hardly any riots at all. So you know, good times will be had, or times of some kind, anyway.

I just got back from my weekend in Berlin. Charlotte and I caught the (very) early Saturday train into Berlin, and she got off at one of the suburb stations to visit her parents while I continued on to the big city. Good times. Wandered around the Kunfürstendamm (shopping street) and marveled at the number of H and Ms. Does any street need three copies of the same store? Saw the bombed out church, which was inundated with tourists, and then went to KaDeWe- the German equivalent of the Bay. Except on the top floor they had a food section with pretty much any food you could imagine. The only possible edible item that they did not have were the fried crickets that we saw in Thailand, which was quite frankly, a relief. Because I enjoy food it was fun to walk around the stalls and look at everything. (Except for the cheese section, which stank.)

Then I went to Checkpoint Charlie (also crawling with tourists) and stayed there for a couple hours. It actually had quite an emotional impact, which was surprising because I am neither a. German or b. old enough to remember communism.

Then I took the tram to the East Side Gallery, which is a section of the Berlin Wall which has been retained and painted on. Except I couldn't see all of it because they were filming some sort of movie in part of it. I kept being swatted out of the way by angry Germans with earpieces.

Then I got quite lost on the subway. More lost than I've been on a transportation system, well, ever in fact. I pride myself on being able to navigate any public transportation system with relative ease (even Budapest!) but I clearly got sloppy. When I finally found my way again it was 6pm, andIi just had enough time to walk around Alexanderplatz and catch the train to Charlotte's parents house in the 'burbs.

There house was in the country- unexpected because they live 30 km away from the city, but it was definitely rural, with cows and fields of poppies everywhere. Quite provincial actually. Their house was beautiful and her parents were very nice and they had a sauna which we went in beforeIi went to bed.

On Sunday we got up late and took a trip to buy Spargel (asparagus). They have a special white kind over here which is a delicacy (and which ironically, I remember learning about in my grade 8 German class as an example of 'German culture'). Then we checked out their horses, situated in a nearby field (they had 12!) and went to Pottsdam for the day. Its a suburb of Berlin, with a castle. Charlotte's Dad was entertaining a big-time immunologist from the States, and so we did an English-themed tour of the castle as a group. The immunologist was the guy that discovered B cells- can you imagine? I had no idea that anyone that fundamental to immunology would still be alive or still active in the scientific community (and he wasn't that old, maybe 60) which left me in a quiet state of ponderment for a couple hours about the fantastic developments in immunology which have occurred over the past couple decades. I mean, it was almost like we were entertaining Watson and Crick.

So then we took the train back to Dresden and here I am. Ready for another week of German cancers.

Blood cancers are terrible. (Fürchbar!)

I think that there is a tendancy with certain cancers to accept them as inevitable. If you live to be a certain age, say 75- there are a probable number of ways that you will die. Now that we are surviving our childhood infections and through all of our pregnancies- chances are you will reach your 70s or 80s. And then death is usually a result of two or three preditable classes of disease- heart disease, stroke, or cancer. Of course all of these diseases are terrible and should be fought against with the utmost vigilance- but they are usually not unexpected. For an individual, yes, for a population group, no.

That's why being on the hematology ward is hard. Its people of all ages. A lot of them came to their family doctor with vague symptoms of bleeding, fatigue going up stairs. They do a blood test and BAM- you have CANCER. And you didn't even feel that sick. Now get ready to lose your hair and live in the hospital. It seems very random.

I just went to a German funk show. It was like a regular funk show, but instead of being at the Pyramid, it was in the basement of a bombed out church. They hadn't fixed it from the 1945 bombing yet, and to walk by it- you would think that it was just ruins. But inside it had red lights and a bunch of bars and stuff and was all hip.

There are far too many words in German that start with SCH. I decided this today after I'd been confusing Schmerzen (pain) with Scheinken (Ham). You can imagine my embarrassment when I realized I'd asked about half a dozen cancer patients if they'd had any ham today.

Tonight I watched Star Wars Episode 3 in German. It was funny- because the dialogue isn't a crucial part of the film (not like, say, the light saber action scenes) I could pretty much figure out what was happening. There were some crucial plot holes that i had to have filled in for me later (WHY did Natalie Portman die when she had all the robots attending to her at the birth?) but mostly it was good times. And Yoda in German was a riot.

Today as I was hanging out in the apartment, I heard loud music coming from the street. I thought it was a car radio, but when it didn't fade away, I went down to the street to have a look. There was a Gay Pride parade in full swing! This city is awesome!

I arrived safely in Germany yesterday. After arriving in Berlin I caught a bus to the train station (all in German by myself!) and then bought a train ticket to Dresden (no help at all! I fricken RULE this country!!) My hostess Charlotte picked me up at the station. I'm living with her and her boyfriend in the trendy part of Dresden- the apartment is in between two record stores, with another record store across the street. And also there's a vintage clothes place. Yeah, I'm a hipster.

I went to the hospital today for a couple hours. I was a little nervous about arriving a couple days past my stated exchange dates. Before leaving Winnipeg I checked out the German website and they said in big letters DATES ARE EXACT- anyone not there on their expected date will be kicked out. It made for a jittery flight over. BUT it turns out that there is a bit of leeway- Charlotte explained to me that some exchange students from countries whose schedules are a bit more relaxed will sometimes take off and travel and not show up until two weeks is left on their exchange. So the harshly worded statement was mostly directed at them.

The department I'm in is actually hematology-oncology (thank goodness for block 6!) and it turns out my conversational German sucks. Like, hugely. I thought I would be able to get the gist of what people are saying, but so far I only catch a few words per sentence. I have been assured that this will get better the longer I stay. Also everyone is very nice and is good about trying to include me.

Also- turns out I don't need my white coat or fancy clothes. All the doctors at the hospital wear blue scrubs as their uniform, and that's it. Hmm- If I would have known this, I might have changed around my packing a bit.

I'm going to Germany tomorrow for a month or two. I'll keep the blog updated!