Hej from Health Teams Abroad: Sweden #hogsabroad

Hej! My name is Will French, and I'm going to be a senior this coming year at the University of Arkansas. I'm majoring in biology, and I decided that this was the summer to study abroad! Being on the Pre-med path, I wanted to gear my study abroad experience towards health related issues. Health Teams Abroad: Sweden was the perfect choice because the whole program is centered on comparing and contrasting U.S. and Swedish health care.

This first week we've been visiting various places around Fayetteville, AR in order to get a good grasp on U.S. health care. Some of the places we visited include the Communit Clinic in Springdale, AR and Washington Regional Hospital in Fayetteville, AR. With this good understanding of U.S. health care, we began our journey to Sweden early Friday morning.

 

 Our plane was set to depart at 6 am, so we all had to arrive around 4:45 am!! Dispite the early hours almost all of the students beat the faculty to the airport! After making short stops in Houston, TX and Newark, NJ, we finally boarded the plane that was going to fly us seven hours to Stockholm, Sweden. Almost everybody slept on the international flight; however, I saw this as the perfect opportunity to catch up on some movies I missed in theatres (The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Iron Man 3, and Anchorman 2). When we arrived in Sweden, with the seven hour difference, it was about 7:30 am on Saturday morning. After some logistics work at the airport, our group loaded up on a travel bus, and we road about four more hours to our final destination Jonkoping. 

Upon our arrival, we met our local student guides, the SUSHIEs. SUSHIE stands for Student Union at School of Health sciences for Internationals. The SUSHIES showed us to our respect dorms, and there we were able to meet our roommates. So far I have met two of my roommates: Max who is from Canada and has been studying abroad in Sweden the entire semester, and Pierre who is from France and has also been studying abroad for the semester. I also have a third roommate who I have yet to meet, but evidently he is from Iran and speaks little to no English! We'll have to break the language barrier somehow.

After we got settled in we went into town and had an amazing dinner at Mäster Gudmunds källare. I got the Masters Plankstek, and believe me it tasted just as good as it looked. After dinner we returned to our dorms and so concluded our first day in Sweden. I can't wait to see what the rest of the trip has in store for me!