Czech Republic Part I

Ahoj! (Ajoi is pronounced “ahoy” and it means hi)

I arrived in Brno, Czech Republic after a few delayed flights and finally made it back to my Brno University of Technology dorm room. The University of Veterinary and Pharmaceutical Sciences is a small university, so we were given dorms elsewhere.

I went to my first day of work this morning. The Czech word for pharmacy is "lekarna". Work begins at 8 am and ends around noon (for me at least: everyone else works the full day). The pharmacy is much larger than it appears from the outside. It consists of three floors, not including storage space. The basement contains a laminar flow hood and other equipment to make sterile ophthalmic solutions, which the pharmacy sells to smaller pharmacies. The main floor is where all OTC products and prescription medications are stored and where interactions with patients occur. Instead of the standard white shelves we have in the US, this pharmacy contains beautiful dark wooden cabinets, drawers, and counters. The second floor of the pharmacy has a break room for employees, two compounding rooms, a locker room, and offices.

There are so many differences between pharmacies in the US and pharmacies here. For one, Czech pharmacies do not count pills because everything is prepackaged from the manufacturer. Pharmacies here are primarily compounding pharmacies. Secondly, controlled drugs are rarely dealt with in community pharmacies because they are mainly provided in hospitals. Thirdly, OTC products are not available for patients to peruse because they are kept behind the counter. The patient must state what he or she needs and is then handed the product to purchase. These are just a few of the differences I have seen thus far.

I have been doing a lot of walking through Brno, getting to know my way around the city while visiting historical landmarks and places of interest such as the Cabbage Market, a farmer's market that has been here since the 13th century.

Brno's namesti Sovbody, or Sovbody Square, is filled with people walking the cobble-stoned streets with an ice cream cone in hand (ice cream is zmrzlina in czech...check out those consonants). The architecture is old and intricate and the city is filled with history like the Augustinian Monastery, where Gregor Mendel formulated his theory of genetics.

Cau (pronounced chau)!