"Sounds like someone has a case of the Mondays"...

I can’t say that I’m unprepared for the trip as far as knowledge goes. I can’t think of anything that I wish I had known, because everything about living here just seemed natural. Well, actually, now that I’m thinking about it, I wish someone had told me that the banks close at 4pm and are not open on weekends, because that is so horridly inconvenient seeing as I usually get home after 5pm. What is this place!? I figure Denmark does not want me to pay my rent… I’ve heard that on Thursday, the bank is open until 5, maybe I can fit that in. also, this isn’t someone anyone would’ve told me, but I wish I had looked into European flights a little bit more before I left. So I can have two 20kg pieces of luggage to fly from the US to Europe. However, within Europe, I can only fly with one 20kg bag. What the hell am I supposed to do with my other 20kg? I’m thinking I’ll send a bag home or something. But with my luck, I bet the post office is only open until 3pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays… or something.

And I just thought of something. I wish someone told me that it’s ok to take 40kg of luggage to Europe, but within Europe you can only travel with 20kg. What is this crap?! What am I supposed to do with my other 20kg, other than paying $300 to ship it back home? RIDICULOUS!

I haven’t been very homesick at all. The first week or so I really missed being with my friends, but that passed. I guess I’m not the type that’s so attached to my family, because I don’t mind being away from them at all. Maybe I’ve just grown accustomed to being away from the summer, as I’ve done it in the past. The other day I was chatting with Kasey, and I actually started to feel homesick. We were talking about Taco Bell. Oh how I love Taco Bell. I really miss that. And hanging out in Champaign. And watching normal TV. But all that aside, I feel like this is home, at least for the time being; maybe that’s why I don’t miss anything so much.

Oh man, my all time favorite point of this week was helping Niels operate on the calves. We’re ending the protocol on the catheterized cows for now and now starting a new project that will follow the stomach development in calves, or something like that. For the experiment, 10 calves are being fitted with rumen cannulas when they are four days old. On Wednesday we had four calves to operate. I was planning on being in the operation room just hovering around and looking over shoulders. Much to my surprise, as I show up, one of the first things I hear is ‘Dagmara what size gloves do you wear?’ and then Niels says, ‘You’ll be helping me today!’ Wowwowwow, that was so cool! My job was to stick the calves with antibiotic when they were put up onto the table, and then help Niels as he performed the surgery. There I was, standing over this little cow with Niels as he cut a perfect little circle into the rumen and stitched it up to the skin. I held some clamps and some sutures, stuck my finger into the rumen; it’s so small compared to the big cows! Then we woke up the calves and waited for them to come to. The next day they were good as new, happy and ready to eat. It was a great experience; I’m really grateful to have gotten the opportunity. I’ll put up some pictures when I upload them!

This week, I have discovered the most ridiculous thing in my life. Purely by accident. I was flipping through all 6 TV channels that we have, when I stumbled across this Danish/Japanese show. It features like, 6 or so Danish people that are on this Japanese game show. It is so absurd it’s barely plausible. The episode I saw, the contestants were dressed up like random things, one was a banana, an eggplant, a mushroom, a cockroach, etc, like, full body costumes. And then they were put in pairs. One person had to use their head to hit this red button to keep a conveyer type track moving, and the other person was on a mini tricycle, trying to ride up this path. And I THINK the point was for the person hitting the button to knock the person off of the track. At the end of the track there was a bit vat of whipped cream that they would fall into. I swear to Jesus that I’m not even making this up.

Least favorite, let’s see… Maybe I’ll get back to last week, Monday to be exact, where just about everything went wrong. In retrospect, it’s pretty funny. Birgit always tells me, ‘Let’s hope this will not be another Monday like before…’ or ‘it should be ok, today is not Monday.’ Amen to that! Any ways, I was on my way to work last Monday, riding down a busy road, minding my own business, when the next thing I know, my damn shoe falls off. Of course I’m going down a hill, so I slam on the brakes of my bike but it takes me to just about the bottom to coast to a stop. I swerve off to the side and run/hop all the way up the hill, and then dodge cars to get to the middle of the road because, duh, my shoe had to land there, and then run back to my bike. It sucked, but I was just cracking up the whole time as I was imagining how retarded I must look to the people driving by. Then I actually got to work, and it was time to start up the Cobas machine. I ran a test, but something was wrong, the machine was giving us weird results. So Birgit and I looked at it, and just ran it again. Wrong again! We figured there wasn’t enough plasma in the tubes to be tested, so we scolded Adam for using all the plasma and got new samples. After thawing and spinning those, we ran the tests again. Wrong still. So now we’re so confused, and Birgit looks at the machine again and says, ‘oh, you put the tubes in the wrong slots, that’s why the machine isn’t reading them.’ Oh Dagmara... It was my fault all along! But that’s nothing new. So I put them all in right, we ran the tests again and found there actually wasn’t enough plasma for two of the samples, so Birgit got new ones, and we ran it again. Then I come to find that we thawed the wrong samples. SO I RAN. THE .TESTS. AGAIN. I was seriously done around 5pm. To do one test. Oh lord and Jesus in heaven, that was the worst day ever. Thankfully, it’s over, and it hasn’t happened again. Little Cobas machine and I have become good pals, and even better, today I ran my very last test. Celebration!
Also, while on my bike yesterday (Monday), I noticed that mother nature was having a ‘case of the Mondays’ as well, because there were so many little animals dead on the road. Like, 5 frogs, about a million snails and slugs, and a little hedgehog. You know, I’ve seen three hedgehogs here in Denmark, and they’re all been road kill. I didn’t even know they had those guys around here!

I don’t really have much to expand on… but I did see from last year some of the girls made lists of things they wanted to do when they got home. I am liking this idea quite a lot. Here goes. When I get back to the states I’m gonna:

-Drive my car. Somewhere far. Like really far. Maybe to a far grocery store where I can buy a lot of really heavy things and I can put them all into my trunk and DRIVE them back home.
-Go to Taco Bell and get a volcano burrito.
-Stop being so healthy.
-Take my dog on the longest walk ever.
-Use a hair drier… I think I fried the one I brought, actually. Haha…
-Text like crazy again. I miss it so much, I feel so disconnected with the world!
-Buy a magazine in English.
-Etc, etc, etc