Halfway Marker

Part 13—Ice Bar

So, on Tuesday, in celebration of the completion of exam 1 of 2 this week, the ice bar seemed in order. Therefore, a small group of my classmates and I hit the town and ventured to the Ice Bar CPH. As you arrive, you first enter a little lobby in which you pay the rather pricey cover and then help you into your parka (which was really more of a very well insulated poncho with a fur-rimmed hood). You are then escorted into the actual ice bar. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Tuesday is not the biggest night for bars, so we were the only patrons for the first few minutes we were there and we had plenty of space and time to fully explore the entirety of the bar. It was smaller than I was expecting, but when everything—walls, bar, benches, tables, even the glasses—is made of ice it’s fairly easy to overlook the small size. So, after fully exploring, other people (presumably other tourists, as I don’t think the ice bar is really geared toward the local) showed up and we decided it was time to try out the ice glasses. I tried a primarily raspberry concoction, which was pretty good, but I think infinitely improved by the fact that it was served in a glass made of ice. All in all it was a fun adventure for a Tuesday night, and I recommend visiting an ice bar should you ever get a chance.

Part 14—Further Adventures

For the most part this week has been fairly quiet because all of the programs had their final exam at the end of the week, wrapping up the first session. I did manage to make it to the National Museum on Wednesday, however, which gave me my first opportunity to use my knowledge gained from Paleolithic Technology last year. I felt like I could actually identify the various types on display, and have a general sense of what was required to make them. It was am admittedly nerdy experience, but it made me happy. Hooray for stone tools! I also enjoyed the part of the museum that was dedicated to “18^th Century Interiors”, as it was rather more engaging than your typical museum display. Overall, though, I think my favorite part of the National museum were the English labels and captions that they had on the displays alongside the Danish ones. There were so many times when it was clear that the author of these captions was not fully in tune with the ins and outs of academic English, as they frequently used terms and phrases I would not have expected to see in a histoy museum. For instance, in a display about ancient domesticated dogs, they had canine coprolites, which they had labeled “dog turds” in English. They also consistently used the term “Grown-ups” rather than “adults” in their captions, which wasn’t quite as funny, but still struck me as a term that you wouldn’t see outside of an exhibit targeted at the 5-6 year-old age group.

Anyway, after my class’s final on Friday afternoon, we all met for dinner at a Moroccan tea room, which was an interesting meal. I don’t think I have before tried Moroccan food, and it was pretty good for the most part, although I found that a lot of the dishes were served cold, which I found rather off-putting. We then went to a pub where we could all enjoy the beverage of our choice (My choice was pear cider, a beverage for which I believe I have previously relayed my affection.) and the company of those of our classmates who were only staying for the first session.

Part 15—HIV

So, by popular demand I’ve decided that I will include some tidbits about HIV/AIDS that I have so far learned, so feel free to skip this section if you don’t care. So, here goes!

I’m sure you all have varying levels of background knowledge about the HIV virus, so I’m just going to list a few things that I found of particular interest or rather surprising from my first class. Feel free to ask or additional info if you want it.

1. I had never really before had a very good sense of where the threshold was between simply being HIV+ and actually having AIDS, but I always kind of assumed that it was based on reaching a certain level o immunosupression. Turns out this is only sort of the case. In order to have AIDS, you have to have acquired a specific “AIDS-defining disease” (of which there is a specific list compiled by various public health organizations). Of course, you have to have to be somehow immunosupressed to develop or acquire these diseases, and each disease has a typical threshold, but you can still potentially get it before your there. So, in short, getting AIDS isn’t determined by reaching a specific set-point of immunosupression, you have to actually get an AIDS-defining disease.

2. The treatments we have for combating HIV are a lot more effective than I thought, but they have really crappy side effects. However, if you stick to your prescribed regiment and regularly visit a doctor, someone who is diagnosed at 25 lives, on average, to age 65.

3. As hard as we try, we are really ineffective at finding ways to prevent HIV transmission. All of our traditional vaccine methods fail, and condoms are still the only real effective prevention we know, as preaching abstinence has failed time and time again.

4. There are six different drug classes that are used to suppress the viral load once an HIV patient starts treatment and prophylaxis. These drug classes target the various stages in the viral replication process, blocking its successful completion. The most used and seemingly most effective of these drug classes are the NRTIs (Nucleotide Reverse Transcriptase Inhibitors), the NNRTIs (Non-Nucleotide Reverse Transcriptase Inhibitors), and the PIs (Protease Inhibitors).

There you go, some fun AIDS facts. If you want further explanation, or you found these wholly unsurprising, let me know, and I will try again.