It's Tuborg Thursday

Hello from Copenhagen,

Only a bit than two more weeks left and then I am back in Germany. My time is okay here, working, working, working and same things as usual: Monday cooking with interns, Tuesday gym, Wednesday swimming, Thursday Badminton or “Tuborg Thursday” (meeting at a pub) etc. This is nice, especially when I am doing something with the other interns (our number is continuously growing, at the moment we are 9) but feels really like a routine, a working routine. Only the money is missing….This week they started to charge us for the apples in the canteen which used to be free.

I am working on my project which is going more slowly than expected but the good news are that on Monday I will interview my first stakeholders, namely one from the European AIDS treatment group and one Robert Koch Institut. I am curious how that will work out. On Monday we are also having a conference on criminalisation of HIV transmission where I also did some research for. Other events going on are the world mental health awareness day which was two days ago and where someone from South Africa called me to ask for a statement in Portuguese about depression. I tried my best ;-) Furthermore, we have a series of lunch-briefings for the interns to learn about programmes and units in WHO EURO. Today there was a talk about malaria in the stan-countries, I did not know that malaria is such a problem there.

My new housing situation is nice, last week my landlady cooked for me and even gave me a hug before I left to Germany for the weekend. Right, I was in Germany for the weekend to see my boyfriend, which was sooo nice because as you might know, a distance-relationships with scheduled phone calls (staying longer at the office for this), not reaching each other when there is a need to talk, etc. is terrible. So we had a nice weekend and celebrated our 1,5 anniversary in a nice thai restaurant.

Ah, I finally have very typical Danish lights for my bike. They are as big as a walnut, about the same shape and you can fix it to your bike with small elastic strips, a great invention. It’s getting darker in Copenhagen…

Take care and hej-hej
Vera