Colin Smith: My name is Colin Smith, a Doctor of Public Health (DrPH) student from UGA, and I will be one of your guides to the 2010 UGA Public Health MayMester Blog. We will be providing you with things of public health (and cultural) interest that we experience as we travel around Croatia for the next three and a half weeks. Each of your guides has an area of special interest that they will be concentrating their blog posts on. Mine is Croatia integration into the European Union (EU) and the impact that it will have on the Croatian public health system. We will also present other topical public health issues that we discover day-to-day and will be reporting on those as well. In addition, from time to time, we may have 'Guest Bloggers' from among the other participants on this trip, both those inside the public health group and from the other disciplines. Be sure to look for their posts as well!
Our first day getting to Croatia seems to have been quite an adventure! I personally came in from Vienna by train and had a scare on being able to make a 7 minute connection from one train to another and we were running late! I made the train and arrived at the Hotel Jadran (pronounced YAD-ran) right before 6PM. Unfortunately, many others of our group were not as lucky. When we left for dinner, we only had 14 of the 26 students who are supposed to be on the trip having arrived. However, during a wonderful welcoming dinner, where we met our wonderful host Dr. Sasa (pronounced SA-Shuh) Poljanec-Boric and our guide Jurai (pronounced YOU-Rye) Perkovik, another six of our group showed up bringing our number to 20. The others we found were stuck in Paris, Barcelona, and Stuttgart. In addition, two of our professors were missing their luggage. Some would say that this was an inauspicious start, but everyone who has arrived was happy to finally be here and enjoyed an absolutely amazing meal and getting to know each other and our hosts. The meal consisted of local dishes, most of whose names we did not catch, but allowed us to get a taste of out new foster-country. We started with a baked cheese and pastry dish that was pleasant, followed by a salad that included shredded cabbage that we found would be a staple of our future meals, we had a version of wienerschnitzel that is Croatian and stuffed with ham and cheese like cordon bleu. This was topped of with a cake/custard with a strawberry gel on it that was tasty and wonderfully light and a great way to end our meal. We wandered back to the Hotel Jadran happy that we had a wonderful meal, had made new friends and were ready to start our adventure.
Charlotte Petonic: Hi! My name is Charlotte Petonic. My undergraduate degree is from Georgia College & State University in Health Education with a concentration in Community Health and Human Services. I am currently working on my masters of education in Health Promotion through Georgia College & State University. I am a graduate assistant for the Student Health Services at Georgia College & State University and the campus health educator. I have spent a lot of my time for my assistantship helping plan and implement programs related to responsible alcohol use, sexual health education and stress management. Throughout this trip and this blog I will look at how Croatia approaches these health issues, and see what kind of education methods work for them, as well as daily or every other day updates on our journey through Croatia.
Ben Sherrill: Dobar dan! (This, of course, is how to say “hello!” in Croatian) My name is Ben Sherrill, and I have the great fortune of being able to experience this wonderful country and report about what I encounter! And you, our faithful blog followers back in the homeland, have the great fortune of reading about our experiences and hopefully taking in some Croatian culture by proxy. Now a little about myself: I received my BSA in Food Science and Technology from the University of Georgia in 2007, with absolutely NO intentions of ever putting it to good use. I am currently pursuing my Doctorate of Pharmacy, and I am enrolled in pharmacy school at UGA, having just finished my 2nd year (out of 4). Since I have a vested interest in pharmacy, I will be reporting to you about pharmacy and the pharmaceutical industry in Croatia, as well as any other health issues I come across that I think I can add some educated insight to. I have never done any sort of program like this before, and I am very excited for this opportunity. I am also fortunate in the fact that my youngest brother, Stephen, is on this trip with me, and I am very happy to have him here. Unlike many others that have now joined us, we both did not have any trouble arriving at our destination in Zagreb. The flight was long, boring (aside from some great chick-flick movies that played, which we of course watched), and included some rather frustrating seat-shakers sitting directly behind us, but overall I can’t really complain. The jet lag was rather intense, but we adjusted pretty quickly, and are running full speed now. I hope you will enjoy reading this blog as much as we will enjoy the experience and writing about it over the next few weeks. But for now, so long and laku noć (good night)!
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Dobar Dan (Thanks for the translation Ben)! :)Great Job with the blog Colin, Charlotte and Ben. We have been waiting and thanks for sharing your experience! Colin, I could just see you rushing to get on that train :) good thing you made it :) I hope you are having a lot of fun and learning plenty to share with your fellow classmates :) Oh and of course a souvenir for Tiff never hurts :) LOL. Well have a great time everyone and I will be following your blog. Zbogom (Goodbye)! Budite sigurni (Be safe) Hopefully I got that correct or shall I say hopefully google got that correct :)
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~Tiffany P.