Beda #5: Favourites

I don't really have any specific topic to blog, so I'll picksomething from our theme list.

Recent Favourites

Defining 'recent' as 'so far in 2014'.

Books

I have read four books so far this year: The Cuckoo's Calling (J.K. Rowling), a german book, A Storm of Swords (George R.R. Martin) and Fangirl (Rainbow Rowell). I kinda liked all of them (gave all of them 4 stars and The Cuckoo's Calling 5 stars).

The Cuckoo's Calling was definitely my favourite book this year so far and also one of the best ones I've read in a while. First of all, J.K. Rowling. I love her writing style, it was already great in Harry Potter, but in those adult books it's especially good. Secondly, I like classic crime books. I know many people thought the book was boring because there is not much action in it, but I think it doesn't need that. I like books where there is a sleuth who goes to person A and asks questions and then he goes to person B and then he wonders if person A told the truth. That's really all I need. 

I didn't know that the second book (The Silkworm) is already coming out in June - that's definitely something I'm looking forward to!

The second half of A Storm of Swords finally got me really into the whole saga. So far I found the books a bit boring, not really that much happening, especially when you've watched the show, but I think it really got turned around. Everybody dies! I know that's what everybody said, but everybody dies! What I didn't like about it was that the first part of the book was extra super mega detailed (I mean, in what book do you know exactly when which person went to pee and to poop etc.?), but in the end he just skipped weeks without even really mentioning it. That didn't really fit together for me, but I guess after page 1000 you gotta wrap up the stories. I now started to read A Feast for Crows and I'm already excited.

Movies

Yesterday I finally watched 12 Years a Slave and it was really a great movie. I think it really deserved all those Oscars and thumbs up for Benedict Cumberbatch as a good-hearted slaver. The story is so touching and 'based on a true story' always adds extra sadness for me. If you haven't watched it yet, go and do so!

When it comes to comedies, We're The Millers was my favourites I've watched this year. It's nothing special, but I just found it very funny. Many comedies have completely used up jokes, but this one was a bit different. I also still like Jennifer Aniston.

And an old one that I rewatched lately: Forrest Gump. How good is this movie?

Music

I must admit that I haven't listened to a lot of music so far this year. New music, this is. Currently I'm listening to the Forrest Gump soundtrack, it's excellent.

TV Shows

Hannibal. Hands down. This show is absolutely amazing, great cinematography, great characters, great actors, great creator-and-fans-interaction. Besides this is one of the only shows that actually gives me shivers and one of the few murders in media that are actually still creative and to some degree shocking. Plus, cannibal puns.

Fun fact: When I was 13 I bought Silence of Lambs (the book) because I was into murders and stuff (like any normal teenager, what, that's not normal?), but my parents thought that it's not appropriate for me and took it away from me. That was a BIG fight. Eventually my father called the school's psychologist (I didn't even know we have one) and she said that I can read it. I am convinced that I would not be so much into Hannibal Lecter if that wouldn't have happened. The same story actually happened with my first Eminem CD. Parenting advise: don't try to forbid your kids things like that. They will end up liking it even more.

From comedy shows I currently only really like 2 Broke Girls (everything else got so weird). This show really makes me laugh out loud every episode.

And Pretty Little Liars. It might be weird, it might be crappy, but damn it's addicting. I WANT TO KNOW WHO A IS GODDAMMIT.

Now I'm looking forward to Game of Thrones which continues on Monday (Sunday, but it will be Monday until we poor Europeans can watch it). 

Food

Lately I like to eat tuna. I didn't like tuna as a kid, but somehow my taste changed. I also eat salami now (always hated it) and I slowly start to eat seafood. Is this growing up? I still don't like most vegetables though. Maybe not that grown up.

Anyway, tuna. I like to make a salad with green salad, corn, red beans, onion, olives and of course tuna. It's heaven. And because even one can of tuna is too much for me, I can eat corn and red beans with tuna for the next two days.

Great, now I'm hungry and my mother just called to tell me that we eat half an hour later. So I will end this blog post and go look for something to snack. Tata!

BEDA #9: Chill mal, ist doch alles easy, baby.

Language are a funny thing. I think we've already established that. Today I want to talk about a) anglicisms, b) germanisms, and c) words that do exists in German, but not in English.

Lately I've started to notice how many words in German are being replaces with English words by now. Of course that's nothing really new, but I never realized how extreme it is by now.
I was sitting in the tram and since I can remember there was always a woman's voice announcing the stations and from time to time she says: "Bitte vergessen Sie nicht, Ihren Fahrschein zu entwerten" (which translates to Please don't forget to stamp your ticket). So that day I sat there and suddenly she said: "Bitte vergessen Sie nicht, Ihr Ticket zu entwerten". Same woman, same sense, different word. I hope you can imagine how shocked I was that after more than 15 years (I don't know about before because I'm not that old, but I assume it was the same) they suddenly changed that one word - to an anglicism. Do people nowadays don't understand German anymore? Did our bus services want to be cool? I'll never know. (I suspect the being cool thing. A few years ago they changed all the displays and signs to all lowercase letters (even the street names and you know that in German capitalization is important because we capitalize all nouns and some other stuff too) and at that point I even wrote them a letter of complaint, telling them how unacceptable I find that. I never got an answer, though).
Anyhow, there are anglicisms everywhere. People seem to have the need to use English words for terms that have a perfectly fine German expression. It's not Winterschlussverkauf anymore, it's mid-season sale. Magister and Doktor became Bachelor, Master and PhD. Kaffee zum Mitnehmen is a coffee to go.
Then there are the words that sounds English, but don't even exists in English. Handy is a mobile phone, a Beamer is a projector. And the English words that were completely germanized, my favorite among those: abgefuckt (which means something like something or someone that looks bad).

In the same manner there are German words in English and it always makes me giggle when those come up. Kindergarten, Rucksack, Doppelgänger, Poltergeist, Wanderlust, Wunderkind. If you think about it, those are all words that have no real English equivalent. I think that in those cases it makes sense that you would adopt a word from a different language. And still there are many words that we have in German, but which don't exist in English. Some examples: Schadenfreude (to be happy about somebody else's bad fortune), fremdschämen (to be embarrassed for somebody, for example friends who are misbehaving), vorgestern (the day before yesterday), übermorgen (the day after tomorrow), Geisterfahrer (somebody who is driving against the right direction on a motorway).
I like that topic, so I will find some more examples (source: my mind and mostly Google). Neuschnee (new snow), Fahne (regularly flag, but in the not-existing-way the way you smell after you drank alcohol), Rabenmutter (a bad mother).

Oh, and there is one missing English word that I would actually need. I'm hungry and I'm starving. I'm thirsty and I'm dying of thirst?! We have a word for that: verdursten. I'm not sure why I need that so often, but I do.

What other words like that do you know? And non-english people, do you also have so many anglicisms in your language?

My (not so) exciting life

I said I'd blog today, so I am doing that. I actually wanted to take pictures, but forgot (of course) so you just imagine everything, okay?
The theme says 'fairly detailed', so detailed you get:

My alarm (which is Poker Face) rang the first time at 7:15. I'm a snoozer, so I hit snooze and continued sleeping until 7:23 or something. iPhone has random snoozing times, sometimes it's 7 minutes, sometimes 9 minutes, you never know. My second alarm rang at 7:32 and that's when I really have to get up.
I was super tired because I couldn't fall asleep until 3 am or so. I have a bad cough and even though I'm taking codeine, it wouldn't let me sleep.
Sleepily I brushed my teeth with my purple electric toothbrush, at least you don't need much brain activity for that. I put in my lenses and went downstairs to make tea. Mischa demanded to be fed, so I gave her some Whiskas. I'm home alone at the moment because my father is in Egypt for two weeks, so I'm the provider for the cat.
My mother picked me up at 8:00 on her way to work and because the hospital is close to the court, I'm usually driving with her.

There was some traffic, so I reached university at 8:20, five minutes too late. The first two lecture were orthopedics, it was not really anything exciting, but it was also not too bad. The third lecture was pharmacology which was a bit boring. Overall the lectures were a torture for me because I'm taking acetylcystein so that I can cough up the mucus. That works nicely, but I can't exactly cough in university because a) it's loud and b) it's a pretty disgusting sound. So half of the time I was about to suffocate, the other half I had a hiccup from not coughing.

At 11:00 I had my first elective course - emergency neurology. It's always quite interesting and the professor tells so many stories of his life. The main subject is what to pay attention to (neurogically) if you have an emergency patient. After that, at 12:00, there is tropical medicine with the same professor. It was about Malaria today which I don't find particularly interesting. It's until 13:30, but I decided to leave at 13:00 so that I have a bit more time at home to rest between courses.

So I went home by bus, watched an episode of Dexter and ate some chinese food we had in the freezer. I had to leave the house again at 15:00 to take the bus back to the hospital for my neurosurgery course.
At least that was quite nice, I was just super tired. It's bedside teaching, in that case it means that our professor gets patients to the seminar room and we can examine them. First there was a woman with back pain, but it was hard to examine her because everything caused her severe pain. The second patient was an old guy with a chronic epidural hematoma, he will be operated tomorrow. They don't really know why he has it, probably he hit his head somewhere. He just went to doctor because he had a headache for a while now.

At 16:30 I went back home, watched one episode of Friends and drank some tea. Now it's 18:30 and I'm playing Heroes of Might and Magic 3 online with le boyfriend. We're getting our ass kicked by the enemies, but we're not losing yet.

Now it's 22:30.

I got hungry and because I was too lazy to go shopping, I had literally nothing to eat at home. So I decided to drive to McDonald's (that's the main reason why I have my driving license), got a Big Mac menu and raced home. I hope they did not measure speed because I was 20-30 km/h over the speed limit. Hey, my fries were getting cold!
I ate while watching Friends.

When I was sitting on the couch downstairs watching Castle, Mischa was misching around and suddenly I saw a mouse running across the floor. Mischa doesn't seem to have any intention in catching that mouse, she's sleeping on my pillow now. Guess I have two pets now. Yay?

Now we're playing Heroes again, but we're about to lose. I showered and will download Bones to watch before sleeping. I decided not to go to university tomorrow, but rather stay sleep long and try to cure my cough.

And that's about it, welcome to my exciting life!

Why today is a good day

Ladies, gentlemen, today I'm having an especially nice day and I thought I should tell you about it. Nothing really special happened, but there were a couple of nice moments that just put me in a great mood (and I don't have those days often lately).
I slept like hell last night because I had a terrible headache that kept waking me up, so I'm a bit surprised myself that this day actually turned out nice (usually I'm in a bad mood the whole day when I sleep badly).

Today is a good day because...

~ it's warm and sunny and I was walking around only in T-Shirt (and pants).

~ everybody seems to be super friendly today, all the salespeople in the shops are nice and wish me a good day and I'm happy and wish them a good day back.

~ I helped a woman who didn't remember the german word for tissue (it's Serviette) and the sales girl didn't know what tissue means.

~ I ate frozen yoghurt with mango flavor in the new Frozen Yoghurt shop that recently opened here. It was very yummy.

~ I got a yellow rose as a bribe gift because we are electing a new major on Sunday.

~ I managed to test the headphones I want to buy, which is a longer story: I want new headphones (on-ear, big ones), but I don't want to buy them without trying, because then they are surely uncomfortable or have bad sound quality or something else. I already narrowed the choice to two headphones on Amazon (Amazon <3) and went to Saturn (an electronics shop) to see if they have those. They had them both, but packed. So I asked if I can try them, but apparently they are "hygienic articles" that can't be opened bla bla bla. But the music guy there said he has one of them in the room in the back because AKG (the brand) sent it to him or whatever, so he brought them for me so I could test them (which was a good decision, because they were even uncomfortable after a minute of testing). The other ones they didn't have, so I thought I could drive to the other electronics shop, Media Markt, to see if they have them. They actually did, AND unpacked, AND they were reorganizing the shop so they were not plugged and I was able to plug them to my iPhone to test them (when they are normally plugged, you can't use your own device and the sample songs they have there are really crappy quality, so you can't really say much about the headphones).
What's even better is that they cost 59,99€ in the shops and 30€ in Poland, so my boyfriend will order them for me and I can save a lot of money. Gotta love the cheap countries in eastern Europe!

~ I got an email that the meeting for a neurotraumatology course I thought I missed last week was move to today.

~ I got the result for the emergency medicine course + test we had last week and I have a 1 (best mark).

~ I had an awesome forensic medicine class today, where they showed us 3D reconstructions they can do from CT images. It's like in CSI or Bones, just... realistic. SO. AWESOME.

~ a drugstore here gives you 3% of the money you spend back and I found a voucher for 0,66€ in the trash in front of it. Might not sound much, but bought me the text marker I needed. Free textmarker!

~ the book I ordered arrived.

~ my cat didn't bring a mouse in two days.

~ I'm invited for dinner at my aunt's place.

~ my parents are in Spain and I enjoy being alone in the house very much.

~ the weekend is a long weekend (5 days) because May 1st is a national holiday.

Yup, that's it. How was your day, did anything good happen to you lately? :)

DFTBA,
Sarah

Sharks are cute

When I was a little Sarah, maybe two or three years old, I wanted to become one of two things: a garbage (wo)man or a crane driver. At least those are the things I still remember.
I wanted to be a garbage woman because it looked like so much fun to stand on the back of the garbage truck and just drive around! At some point I noticed that garbage is pretty smelly though, and that I don't like that at all and thus that dream was over.
The crane driver ambition is easy to explain: those people we SOOOO high up in the air, how can that be not awesome? But my parents were not very supportive in that career choice and didn't send me to a crane driver school, so I had to find myself another occupation.

The next thing I remember that I wanted to become is a vet. Duh, original. It seemed pretty nice to play with kittens and puppies and bunnies all day long, but my mother, supportive as she is, told me that they bite and that you don't only treat small pets, but also horses and cows and that didn't seem so cool anymore. I was pretty scared of big animals back then (okay, let's be honest, I still have respect of them).

And then my big dream: marine biologist. I think that lasted the longest. More specifically, I wanted to become a shark scientist. I still have a huge fascination for sharks and I always want to watch shark shows on Animal Planet or Discovery Channel at my boyfriend's house (I only have cable and don't get those channels) and go to see shark at the aquarium in the city he lives in (though they are in the basement for a couple of years already because they build a new aquarium for them, so I never got to see them so far).
Anyway, I thought it would be pretty cool to travel to all those exotic places, swim with shark, study them, seems like an awesome life!
I don't really know what changed my life then eventually. I probably found out that you don't only dive in pretty places with pretty fish, but you also have to know about algae and microorganisms and stuff like that and that was something I really didn't want to. I also have a childhood TV show trauma where they were on an oil rig and were diving to the bottom of the ocean and there was a monster. I'm still panicking when I'm swimming and some plants are touching me, or, my biggest nightmare, the chains buoys are fixed with. I find that so disgusting and I always need somebody to check it out for me, if it is safe. Disgusting things wise. In retrospective, I probably would have made a very lousy marine biologist :D

I think other short dreams I had included: zoo keeper (ALL the animals!), captain of a ship and doctor (I wrote that in one of those friendship books that were so popular in the early 00's, but I'm not sure if I didn't just want to be cool).

I have to go, my cat is rioting in front of her cat door because I locked her out. She had a mouse. I don't want a mouse. I already spend an hour this morning catching a mouse that she brought and that hid behind my parents' bed. Damn you, Mischa!
Oh, the cat is inside. She broke in!? I have raised a monster cat.

DFTBA,
Sarah

Sarah 101

Hello guys, nice to meet everybody!

My name is Sarah, I am 21 years old and was born, live and study in Innsbruck, Austria. No, we don't have kangaroos here and you would be surprised how often people ask me this. Mozart, Freud, mountains, people who lock their children in basements? That's us.
I'm studying medicine in my 5th semester, but actually the semester ends on Tuesday, so let's already say 6th. Vacation, yay!
I have a sister who just started studying medicine too, but in Vienna. My parents are both judges and hope that at least one of us would study law, so they were very disappointed that we are both becoming doctors. I also have a cat called Mischa (I know it's a guy's name, but she's female. She is named after Hannibal Lecter's sister Mischa in Hannibal Rising), who is a big hunter and managed to bring home animals of ten different species. She's also very aggressive and very cute (deadly combination).

So why am I studying medicine? That's a difficult question with an easy answer: I did not have a plan B. When I was 16, we went with school to some "Day of the Brain" event in university and we listed to some lectures and could hold brains and I thought: that's cool, that's what I want to do later. I never really found any other field that would interest me as much as medicine does. In order to study medicine here you have to pass an entrance exam (2500 applicants for 400 places), I passed on the first try and so the situation was quite clear. Now, if I could not study medicine anymore, I would probably study shipbuilding. I can't really explain why, but I love ships.

I want to become a neurosurgeon - I knew that already before I started university and I knew it before Grey's Anatomy. My parents want me to look into other fields too, but the more I see of other specialties, the more I'm sure that neurosurgery is the way to go. I definitely want to become a surgeon of any kind, I loved the dissection course we had, I like anatomy and the brain just fascinated me. A lot. I did a four week long internship at the Neurosurgical Department of the hospital in Vienna and I had such a great time there. I loved finally learning something practical, not all the boring stuff like biochemistry that we learn in university. I was also able to attend a microsurgery course and I love suturing, especially with teeny tiny threads and instruments (the thread is thinner than a hair and the needle is only a few millimeters long).

I am traveling a lot, unfortunately so far only inside Europe. My boyfriend lives in Poland, so I'm spending a lot of time there and he is a journalist for ski jumping, so if I have time I accompany him to competitions. I like the north of Europe a lot, I love Finland (contrary to common prejudice, I find Finnish people very kind and helpful. Hi, Mia!) and Norway, in fact, I'm applying for an Erasmus spot for a semester abroad in Oslo at the moment.
My dream is to go to New York City soon and I'm hoping to fly there in April for a short vacation.

I like to read, of course, but I'm having troubles finding time and attention to read because I spend most time in front of my computer. The last book I read was The Fault In Our Stars, which is one of the most beautiful and heart-breaking books I have ever read and I always find it difficult to read any other book after reading something so great. By the way, I have an unsigned copy of TFiOS because Amazon DE had a big screw up and apparently employ people who can't read and calculate how many preorders they will need.
And TV shows. If you already think you watch too many shows, what should I say then? I am watching (in no order whatsoever): How I Met Your Mother, The Big Bang Theory, Grey's Anatomy (or as I like to call it: How Not To Be A Doctor), Sherlock BBC, Bones, Dexter, Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, Community, New Girl, 2 Broke Girls. I watch Doctor Who from time to time, but I got stuck in season 4 and I can't really bring myself to watch it on a regular level. It's a great show, but for me it's hard to watch it one episode after another like I do with other shows.

Things I dislike: fangirling over Youtube persons (especially Charlie - I know he is cute and funny, but he is also just a person and in my opinion a tiny bit overrated. I find Alex Day funnier and Eddplant the better singer. That's it.), people who always have to say something even if they don't know anything, fishing for pity, vegetables.

And some random facts about me: I'm messy, but everything needs to have a system. I'm very meticulous, for example everything that I write that is related to each other has to be written with the same pen and I sort my socks by color. And I love nail polish, the more colorful, the better.

That's it for now, I'm really looking forward to read more of your blog post, you all seem like such interesting people and I can't wait to get to know you more!

DFTBA,
Sarah