Czech Republic Part II

Dobry den (good afternoon/good morning/good day/hello...basically an all encompassing greeting),

I've been in Brno almost a week and am feeling increasingly more acquainted with Czech Republic's second largest city and the culture that surrounds it.

Czech has this soda called Kofola that was introduced while it was a communist country and did not import Coke or Pepsi. Kofola looks like Coke but takes more sour and has hints of lemon/lime. I was excited to try it when a few people told me that they prefer it to Coke, but I think I'm good after trying it once. Another thing, they have multivitamin flavored soda here, but multivitamin just means mixed fruit. It threw me off when I first read it on a menu.

Emily and I have been making ourselves useful at work by putting away the daily medication order from the distributor. That's our main contribution, I would say. We also do a lot of observing...observing the compounding process, observing interactions with patients.

Other major differences between pharmacy here and pharmacy in the US are that here, upon receiving large stock bottles from the distributor, they must open and smell each one to make sure it the label matches what is in the bottle. All orders from the distributor are rubber banded together which makes it much easier to find the same medication. Inventory is done once or twice a year while CIIs are checked every month. Two copies of the CII prescription are made. The original copy is sent to insurance, one copy goes to the doctor, and one stays in the pharmacy. All medication labels (pills, ready made creams and ointments, anything compounded) are hand-written except if they are special order allergen vaccines directly from the distributor - those have the labels pre-typed. I didn't even know allergen vaccines existed before yesterday. So far I've seen dog/cat hair and grass allergen vaccines.

Emily and I have been watching the World Cup, although being in Europe you would think that any European city would partake in fotbal festivities, but Brno is big on ice hockey so it's been a challenge to find bars to watch the games and to encounter people that are excited. You would think I was in the US with the soccer apathy I've encountered. (In case you haven't been watching, the US tied England!)

Emily, our coworker Basia, and I took a day trip to Vienna (or Wien as the Austrians call it). It took an hour and 45 minutes by bus to get there. The city looked pretty desolate when we arrived because it was before 8 am on a Sunday morning. We visited the Natural History Museum in its entirety before making it to the Schonbrunn Palace, home to the rulers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. We took an informative guided tour which was actually really interesting but confusing with all the inbreeding and who's related to who. We spent the rest of the day walking around, sitting at cafes (we also went to Starbucks because Basia had never been there and insisted that we go) and tourist watching. Vienna is chock full of tourists from all over the place. Vienna is known for its coffee, chocolate, churning out of classical composers (Mozart, Schubert, Haydn, Strauss, etc.), and of course wiener schnitzel. Wiener schnitzel is nothing like the American fast food chain. It's usually pork or veal that's been pounded into a thin slab of meat, fried, and served with a lemon wedge. It doesn't sound very appetizing, but it's surprisingly good.

Emily and I took a trip to the laundromat today. The laundromats here are also bars. I didn't understand why til I saw it for myself. It took 3 hours to do one load of laundry so it would make sense to give customers the option of getting drinks while they waited.

Till next time,
Kristin