Athens 2009

I came to Greece by plane that landed in Athens. I had to take the X95 bus to centre because the metro line to the airport was under construction. Plane tickets cost 420e from Oulu-Helsinki-Budapest-Athens and the same route back. The prices in general were little lower than in Finland, at least food was cheaper. I did my clinical exchange in the department of Paediatrics in a hospital called: Agia Sofia Paediatrics hospital. It was a medium size hospital with some specialities missing. The medical school was only a five min walk from there. I was with the doctors for the rounds and some clinic duty. There were some differences with the way the patient history was recorded, they did use electric patient databases. I didn’t know any Greece when I went there, so I had some trouble understanding what was said, only some of the doctors spoke English. I didn’t do much by myself at the hospital, I mostly just observed. There seemed to be less paper work in the hospital than we have here in Finland. First week I spend four or five hours at the hospital and later on the next weeks I spend little less time there. There were some cultural differences when compared to Finland. The people in Greece seemed to be more open in some ways like touching each other and greeting friends with kisses. The staff at the hospital also seemed quite easy going people and there was good casual communication between nurses and doctors. The patients had mostly the same problems as the ones in Finland, the population structure is pretty similar compared to Finland, and they have lots of old people. If you ask me the people
there are less fat and have less problems with alcohol, but that’s just my intuition.

There were twelve exchange students there with me, we had nice social time together. I was living in a student house with a Spanish roommate. We were living in a bit crazy area, with a lot of immigrants, and one night there was a demonstration with fires, broken glass and teargas. The girls lived in a better neighbourhood. Inside the dorms were nice and with a lot of space and relatively well equipped and we had a wifi connection which was a major plus. Food was good and we went to the hospital once or twice to eat each day. After a while the food started to seem a bit too greasy.

The city is surrounded by mountains and maybe that’s one reason why the city is so densely over populated cause there is little space to expand it. The sun made the days hard to coupe in the beginning, but museums had very good air-conditionings and we also had this card called Passo which is the local student card and most museums were free with this card and it also gave us some discount from metro tickets and the ferry tickets. We got the passo from the local IFMSA people in the first day. I used a combination of metro, bus, and walking to get my hospital, and it still took me 45min to go each direction, which was kind of a bad thing and lowered my motivation to go there, so I skipped some days, but nobody cared about it too much. The local exchange committee was really good at organising social program and they were very helpful if you had something on our mind. On the weekends we visited islands near Athens with a ferry boat, the tickets cost about 30e two ways. We visited two islands called Santorini and Agistri. It was very nice to get out of the car filled Athens for a weekend escape. I would recommend island hopping for anyone who goes to Athens for a longer time than one week, because you can see most of the important cultural places and museums of Athens in a week. During the weeks we visited the ancient theatre close to Athens and went to some beaches where we went swimming. The theatre had some amazing acoustics and you could hear everything were well with out any microphones and with some ten thousand people in the audience. We also had some roof parties at the dorms where the girls were staying (at Oluf Palme Dorms) and those were nice and there also lots of local students. We also had this really sensual and spiritual beach party one night with a big fire and lots of different drinks and night swimming. And one night we went to this huge club at the beach called Balux, it was a nice place but maybe a little bit of a show-off place for the young and rich people.

I didn’t try to get any study points for my exchange. The city where I was staying was a kind of too big to handle for much longer than a month. It not a so called beautiful city, quite the opposite, but it has some history and some pearls left between the “bunkers”. And the nightlife in Athens is quite good, and we had great time with the other exchange students. It was very hot there during the summer and almost no rain, it was hard for me first to cope with the hot weather and I had to learn to drink more fluids. But all in all it was a very good trip!

That’s all, hope you enjoy it!