Short Study Tour : Day 1

One thing that makes DIS such a wonderful program are the study tours they arrange for the students to go on. Each core course goes on a short (3 days) and long (1 week) study tour where we travel to various places as a class and go on both academic and cultural visits, and all of this included in our tuition- the hostels, the transportation, most of the food… it's all planned out and paid for already by DIS just for us. So already it sounds like a sweet deal, and it only gets sweater now that I've been on one tour already. The tour was an amazing time, I saw such beautiful places, learned a lot, and really bonded with my classmates.

As the title says this blog is about short study tour. For this trip we went to western Denmark, to Odense (on the Island of Funen) and Sønderborg (in southern Jutland).

Our adventure began bright and early as we loaded onto a tour bus at 8am. After a 2 hour bus ride, we arrived in Odense and started the day off at a ropes course.

 Here we all suited up into out harnesses and ascended into the trees for a series of obstacles including swings, right ropes and zip lines… which all turned out to be a lot more difficult a task than I thought. You may be thinking, Hayley that's dangerous to be climbing up in the trees! were you wearing a helmet? you could get hurt! the answer is no, no helmets involved… a helmet is a rare sight in Denmark even with the massive bike traffic all around… and yes you can get hurt, and people did. Most of us were waiting inside, finished without turn on the courses, when one of our leaders got a text from a student saying "help. 2 girls stuck in tree." It turned out that there was a mis-communication about whether a zip line was clear or not and a girl was still on the zip line when the next girl took off. They collided in the middle of the zip line and were then stuck there. Then to make matters worse when the man who worked there came with a ladder, one of the girls fell off the ladder while trying to get down. AND this whole time it had started to rain. Man am I glad I was already safe and sound off the course. Emergencies aside, it was a really fun time.

Next we  switched to our academic focus and went to hear from a General Practitioner. In Denmark there is socialized medicine. In their free health care system everyone has a GP, and the GP is who they go to for just about everything that’s wrong with them. Specialists like cardiologists, pulmonologists and even pediatricians only see the patient if it is a more complex case. A patient is referred to the specialist only by their GP, in this way the GP is a sort of gatekeeper to the health system. Free health care isn't free in every sense of the word,  Danes paid sky high taxes, roughly 30-50% of their income, and the richer people pay a higher percent of taxes. It may seem outrageous but pretty much all Danes are in agreement about paying high taxes to get free healthcare.

After our lovely GP visit, we went to our hostel and then were on our own for dinner. Most of us went out exploring Odense, I saw the childhood home of Hans Christian Anderson, and then we went to dinner. After words we all ended up at a free jazz night recommended for us at a local bar, which was quite enjoyable.

And so ends day one of Short Study tour…. read on to the next post my friends…